The Evolution of Mean
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ads made fun of Obama’s popularity, painting him as “The One” as religious
imagery follows and a voice asks, “Can you see the light?”54 Early in the
campaign Obama dismissively called Hillary Clinton “Annie Oakley” for her
attempts at faux populism, but after voters did not receive his sarcasm well he
subsequently modeled Reagan’s affability and statesmanship, and in later
photographs he even began to sport a touch of grey for added gravitas.
Ironically, a young, mixed-race Democrat successfully inherited Reagan’s
grandfatherly charisma, and even more strangely, his Republican foes
remembered nothing from Carter’s loss.
Conclusions
The differences between the American election campaigns of 1980 and
2008 are not essential but ones of degree. There were still examples of the sort
of festive folk humor in 2008 which sits on the fringes of satire, shading into
simple playfulness. Some of the 2008 campaign humor was still nonpartisan folk
comedy; in another YouTube segment of Obama Girl, bikini girls dance as a
CNN ‘React-o-meter’ scrolls, and late-night talk shows also made general,
inoffensive gags about the length of the campaign or “jokes that merely say,
‘John McCain is old,’ or ‘Bill Clinton likes the ladies.’”55 There were post
election columns written about how the election of a popular president may spell
the decline of what Salon dryly calls the “satirical industrial complex.”56
Nevertheless, the overall trend is that in comparison to 1980, the political
satire of 2008 was more piercing, more partisan, and more aware of itself as a
political influence. Various causes have been adduced for this shift from the
communal, festive satire of “laughing with” to the cynical satire of “laughing
at,”57 from the loss of public trust after Watergate to Reagan’s denigration of his
own calling. Nevertheless, much of the change in tone of 21st century satire is
technological, as specialized cable shows and privately-generated content have
created strong niche markets for darker and more partisan forms of satire. Yet
while the internet might have developed as chaotically as it did anyway, it was
Reagan’s ideological petulance in vetoing down the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in
1987 which helped lead to shock-talk radio and the partisan television networks
which would help defeat McCain in 2008.