Celebrity galas in the McCain White House are going to be awful
August 26, 2008 | by Richard Gowan | More on Global system, Influence and networks, North America | No comments
Do you know who these people are?
You do? OK, get off this blog and play outside. You don’t? Then you’re over 16. They are the Jonas Brothers, a Disney-produced band with an enormous following among early teens in States. Last week, we found out that Dick Cheney’s a fan too, as the lads visited the White House to make a public service film about national parks and the Veep brought his granddaughters by to say hello.
About time. The Brothers have “visited the Bush White House three times, and are noted Evangelical Christians”. This leads us to the all-important question of which celebrities we can expect to see in the White House as of January next year. I’ve highlighted Barack Obama’s success in bringing RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan into public politics, but musicians up to and including Kanye West are descending on the Democratic Convention in hordes like never before. That has not, of course, stopped the Democrats from reportedly booking Springsteen and Bon Jovi to headline before Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday - they may have a fifty-state electoral strategy, but musically they’re all New Jersey.
The real question is, however, what the celebrity coterie hanging around a McCain White House might look like. The candidate launched a small war with Paris Hilton, and is trying to spark something similar with Madonna. Earlier this year, Doonesbury ran a great series of comic strips about a Hollywood fixer trying to recruit stars for the Republicans, settling for a lesser Baldwin brother. Now, the NYT blog reveals, politics is imitating satire, but at a sub-Baldwin level. Here’s its account of a recent fundraiser in Hollywood, oddly entitled “McCain’s celebrities”:
The (press) pool reported that the actors in the crowd included Gary Sinise, Dean Cain, Jon Voight, Jon Cryer, Angie Harmon, Craig T. Nelson and Lorenzo Lamas, among others.
Shouldn’t that be “McCain’s celebrity“? Jon Voight is, of course, a big name. The rest? Gary Sinise was good as the guy left on the ground in Apollo 13. Erm, Dean Cain was solid in the Superman TV series in the mid 1990s, but let’s face it: co-star Teri Hatcher has gone further. So what are we to make of this?
Mr. McCain was cheered when he told the crowd that he “would like to thank so many brave and courageous people who are here that happen to be in the business of Hollywood who are risking their entire futures and careers.”
He must be thinking of Dean’s rumored involvement in Maneater, in pre-production:
A former FBI profiler, now a sheriff of a small town and a single parent of a high school aged daughter, begins to profile a series of unexplained murders only to learn that the monster he’s profiling may be himself.
Ooh, I’m looking forward to that. If nothing else, Mr. Cain hamming it up sounds more fun than a celebrity gala at the McCain White House.
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