Conservatives are freaking out
that one light-hearted ad could
put Obama over the top:
Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody.
You want to do it with a great guy.
It should be with a guy with beautiful...
Lena Dunham
So gush the initial twelve seconds of titillation in Lena Dunham's GOTV ad for Obama. Then suddenly music tempo signals a shift — the innuendo is momentarily ditched, and the viewer's attention is abruptly refocused on
policy.
Lena Dunham's first time
The ad is somewhat reminiscent of another much-seen video that, for the first 18 seconds, drips with apparent gay innuendo: "Breakup"—
2013 Nissan Altima: Break Up
Another tease, another abrupt attention shift.
Both ads work well. They get attention. More than that, they create buzz.
TV Guide called Dunham's ad cheeky. The Hollywood Reporter said that she caused a stir. The Atlantic Journal-Constitution jocularly asserted that the ad filled countless fainting couches. Mediaite embraced the same hyperbole by comparing the ad's impact on conservatives to another whimsical commercial:
Would You Please Pass the Jelly?!
ThinkProgress notes that "conservatives have been harping on essentially the same theme [as the Lena Dunham ad] all election season, dodging direct references to sex but sexualizing the office of the presidency and a woman’s political life." ThinkProgress offers five examples, two of which I include here.
Note the ad titles: "The Breakup" (sound familiar?) and "Boyfriend":
The Breakup
Boyfriend
Trisha B., declaring that Republicans were "twisting their panties" over the Lena Dunham ad, thought it was no more sexy than "a strange guy’s erection hitting your ass on the subway. I really got no sexual vibe at all. Was I supposed to?"
Lawrence O'Donnell (perhaps hyperbolically?) called the Lena Dunham ad "the hippest ad in the history of presidential campaigning, starring, possibly, the most ultra-cool person in the history of television."
Lawrence O'Donnell skewers hypocritical reaction
to Dunham ad, cites Reagan as precedent
O'Donnell's Dunham segment on The Last Word showed numerous examples of over-the-top conservative backlash, and featured a Reagan video snippet about voting Republican the first time that was at least comparable to Dunham's innuendo.
One of the conservatives belly-aching the loudest against the ad was blowhard Rush Limbaugh. He repeatedly teased the segment on Dunham: "No, I have not forgotten the Lena Dunham ad. I've got it here. It's coming up. Be patient." Then he played the audio multiple times during his Friday talk show.
Rush asserted the Dunham ad was inspired by an ad run by that Ruskie, Putin. He railed that it was so bad, Obama would prevent his own daughters from seeing it. He called running the ad "exploitative... This administration continues to plunge the depths. There is no depth too low they won't go. It's all desperation."
Rush droned on and on until he finally, sanctimoniously declared: "it's insulting to women. It again looks at women as monolithic sex machines..."
This was precisely one day after Limbaugh himself asserted — in a lurid monologue alleging that female biology affects political party preference — that "women are robotic, they are monolithic."
When hypocrisy comes so thoroughly drenched in irony, what more is there to say?
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