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PrintFebruary 28, 2011
Even the Oscars are not an 'Obama-free zone'
The One was on our boob tube again last night. Barack Obama made an Oscar cameo appearance at the Academy Awards. Groan.
The Hill:
President Obama made a cameo at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards, broadcast on Sunday.
The president appeared in a montage of man-on-the-street interviews, during which participants were asked to name some of their most memorable songs from movies.
Obama appeared in the montage to say that his favorite was "As Time Goes By," the song sung by actor Dooley Wilson in the classic "Casablanca."
This was symbolic on several levels.
Lest we forget, Barack Obama never tires of seeing himself as the world's biggest celebrity so why not show up on one of the most-watched TV shows around the world. In a sense, he scored a second time within a month because he also was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly before the Super Bowl -- also one of the most watched broadcasts on the planet. He truly is the world's biggest celebrity, as the old McCain ads put it in a deservedly mocking way.
He has been the toast of Tinsel Town for years now, always happy to accept millions of dollars and free publicity from Hollywood. He had a direct pipeline to mega agent Ari Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel, his former Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago.
The entertainment industry has adored Barack Obama. Remember, among all the awards he has pocketed was a Grammy merely for talking!
Obama is the political manifestation of Hollywood's talent and skills at their best. Hollywood celebrities -- and Barack Obama -- rose to stardom using the same types of tools and craft: artifice, a willing media, high-technology , public relation machines, posters, teleprompters (or cue cards for stars with short-circuited short-term memories) and the willingness of people to suspend disbelief. Hollywood excels in myth-making, after all.
Clearly, he has a natural affinity for Hollywood folks. Self-absorbed, egotistical celebrities who live the high life while many Americans suffer are his type of pals. They are very different from the rest of us and from, say, those bitter dead-enders in small town America who grasp at God and Guns or people who live in those suburbs that bore him so much. Hollywood, the national capitol of narcissism, is a congenial place for our most narcissistic of politicians.
And of course, many Hollywood celebrities flout the laws and "get away with it", showing the same type of disregard for the public that President Obama has shown on the other coast with far more damaging consequences.
Is Barack Obama's political radar on the fritz? Does he not realize the risk of making light of himself -- or rather the office of the President (not quite as bad as Richard Nixon on Laugh-In) by appearing at the Academy Awards, albeit in a brief video? We may have had enough of him but clearly he has not had enough of himself. That will never happen.
Much of the Middle East is in revolt that has him voting present, unemployment is sky-high in America, the price of a gallon of gas is soaring, and Barack Obama finds time to film a video clip for the Oscars. Does he not realize how this stunt merely reinforces the view of Americans who think he is having a high time in the White House-enjoying pick-up basketball games with NBA superstars, the never-ending musical soirees in the East Room (that he has transformed into a private nightclub); the golfing; the fancy vacations to estates in Hawaii and Martha's Vineyard, the luxury lifestyle of jaunts to Spain. The world is his playpen.
His cameo was so jarring -- mixing it up with "real" people doing on the street type of interviews-that it even made my kids groan. I thought the Oscars might be, finally, an Obama-free zone. Then I realized there is no such a place in America.
