Pop goes the president
Jobs, debts and taxes take a back seat to bubble gum
To the clamor for administration records concerning embassy security, I’d like to add my own request. I hereby subpoena President Barack Obama’s iPod. Nicki Minaj? For real? On Friday the president claimed that her voice was one of those occasionally streaming through his ear buds. I don’t buy it. For starters, she once rapped, facetiously or not, that she was voting for Mitt Romney and that Obama was a “lazy” noun-that-I-can’tprint-in-this-newspaper. On top of that, the president strikes me as more of an Adele guy, rolling in the deep of a postdebate funk.
But he’d been asked to weigh in on Minaj’s feud with Mariah Carey, and after praising Carey for fundraising help, he hastened to throw some love in her foe’s direction. While Romney is on multiple sides of a single issue, Obama is on all sides of iTunes.
Right about now you’re probably wondering which journalistic titan assigned Obama the role of diva diplomat, daring him to effect a diva detente. David Gregory? Diane Sawyer?
Close! It was Michael Yo Simmons, a disc jockey who calls himself the “halfblack brother with a Korean mother.” Simmons moonlights as a correspondent for E! News and was quizzing Obama for the Y100 radio station in Miami. You’d think Obama would be wary of such unorthodox terrain. You’d be forgetting that he’s braved the wilds of David Letterman seven times and “The View” five times and has the dis- tinction of being the first sitting president to appear on a daytime TV talk show.
You’d also be overlooking the muchnoted stretch last summer when he did interviews with People, Glamour and “Entertainment Tonight” while harderedged media went hungry. On the website Mediaite, Jon Bershad teased: “As we speak, I imagine one of the president’s top aides is running into the room excitedly. ‘Mr. President!’ the aide yells. ‘Good news! We booked that interview with Mad!’”
This presidential election will go down as the one in which the pop-culture pander reached its ludicrous apotheosis and we were asked to believe things even more fantastical than a revenue-neutral 20-percent cut in marginal tax rates.
Things like Romney’s swoon for Snooki, whose “spark-plug personality” he praised when he manned up for a grilling from 2012’s heir to David Frost and Tim Russert. I speak, naturally, of Kelly Ripa.
Politicians once labored to affirm their seriousness, ticking off the tomes they’d read. Now they’re as likely to assert their silliness, tallying up the stars they ogle.
Being a pointy head is risky, unless you’re also a headbanger. So Paul Ryan balances his pie charts with his playlist: AC/DC, Twisted Sister, Rage Against the Machine. You look at those bands’ names and think: The man has either a wicked sense of humor or a subconscious in florid rebellion.
I blame Bill Clinton, who toted his saxophone onto “The Arsenio Hall Show,” an exhibitionist about his embouchure. But at least he had the courage of his pop-culture squareness, mooning over Judy Collins and “Chelsea Morning” rather than Courtney Love and “Doll Parts.”
His successor, George W. Bush, had the courage of his pop-culture ignorance. During his 2000 campaign, he conceded that he’d never seen the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic,” couldn’t place Leonardo DiCaprio and thought “Friends” was a movie.
When Bush sat down for his own Glamour interview and his interrogator mentioned “Sex and the City,” his face “blistered in a purple fury,” according to the article. He thought those words augured an inquiry into his erotic and geographic whereabouts.
These days, I get the sense that candidates are prepped as fully on the Billboard Hot 100 and the Nielsen Top 20 as on trade pacts.
Stuart Stevens to Romney: “Favorite Lady Gaga song?”
Romney: “‘Poker Face’ because it’s what a commander in chief needs to negotiate with world leaders!” Stevens: “Favorite TV show?” Romney: “‘The Voice’ because 53 percent of Americans have a unique one, which can realize its potential if freed from federal regulations and the whining of the other 47 percent.”
Obama has Romney beat on the television front, having already laid claim to “Homeland,” with its theme of cunning in the war on terror. And while Ann Romney recently telegraphed a modern sensibility by raving about “Modern Family,” she’s pop-culture miles behind Michelle Obama, who made a guest appearance on “The Biggest Loser” and did push-ups on “Ellen.”
The way things are going, I wouldn’t be shocked to look up in 2016 and see Ryan on “Survivor” and Hillary Clinton chatting with Ricki Lake about her secret passion for the “Rush Hour” movies and crush on Jackie Chan.
That’s the sort of thing that pols believe will get through to — and reassure — a distracted electorate. I’m not sure if that says more about them or about us.