Sunday, September 28, 2008

Hey Little Sister Shotgun

Stunt casting is the practice of casting big-name celebrities in bit parts in TV series for the purpose of drawing media attention. Now it seems that John McCain has expanded the concept to give us stunt campaigning. First was the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, next was his non-suspension suspension of his campaign/bungee-jump to Washington to derail/save the Wall Street bailout bill. Now, according to the The Times, the McCain campaign has announced plans to televise the upcoming shotgun wedding of Palin's pregnant teenage daughter Bristol to Levi Johnston, the dumbass kid who knocked her up.

Expect this to remain the pattern for the rest of the election. McCain is behind Obama in the polls, and there is realistically no way for him to pull ahead short of some terrible blunder by Obama, who is not in the habit of committing terrible blunders. McCain's only hope is to launch a series of ever-more desperate Hail Mary passes and hope one of them succeeds. (Slate has already put up an article predicting McCain's next ten campaign stunts, and Brad at Sadly, No! is polling his readers on what the next stunt will be.)

I predict that in the future, historians discussing the disintegration of the Republican Party will cite the McCain campaign as the event that marked the point of no return.

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