This one is based on a story that’s four years old, though its source material dates back to at least the late 1960s. Back in 2004, Mark Steyn watched that year’s Democratic presidential candidate forced to backpedal because of comments made by celebrities and one of his fundraisers and quipped:
John Kerry’s raised nearly 50 million bucks from Hollywood, and, short of divorcing Teresa and the pre-nup kicking in, he’s not going to find that kind of money anywhere else. So he’s obliged to go along with, for example, Whoopi Goldberg comparing President Bush with her own, ah, intimate areas, as she did at a recent all-star Kerry gala. Or with Meryl Streep musing, ”I wonder which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president’s personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families in Baghdad.” The financial benefits of the celebrification of the Democratic Party are unquestionable. But the surest sign of its limited appeal in the broader sense was the Kerry campaign’s refusal to release the video of the Goldberg-Streep gala. Having the most popular figures in popular culture on your side can seriously damage your popularity.
And here we go again! Same basic plot, different actors:
Barack Obama today has distanced himself from comedian Bernie Mac after an appearance at an Obama fundraiser last night. The comic performed a profanity-laced set at the function which ended with hecklers telling him to get off the stage after a joke that some deemed particularly offensive to women. Obama joked about the fundraiser being a “family affair” when he followed Mac on stage, but the campaign got more serious about criticizing the comedian afterwards:
Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago, the 50-year-old star of “The Bernie Mac Show” joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language.
“My little nephew came to me and he said, ‘Uncle, what’s the difference between a hypothetical question and a realistic question?'” Mac said. “I said, I don’t know, but I said, ‘Go upstairs and ask your mother if she’d make love to the mailman for $50,000.'”
As the joke continued, the punchline evoked an angry response from at least one person in the audience, who said it was offensive to women.
How did it get more offensive? The Chicago Tribune gives a little more detail:
He promised to help Obama and ended his irreverent riff with a joke involving the women in the families and living with two “hoes.”
“Hoes”, eh? That Bernie Mac–he’s such a rake!
Particularly, as Ed Morrissey notes, in an environment where the women who are ex-Hillary voters that Obama is trying to woo are still teed-off over establishment liberal news coverage of her that they see as “sexist”, here’s some real sexism shoved into their faces by a comedian in his role as an Obama surrogate.
But then, as Mark Steyn wrote four years ago, “Having the most popular figures in popular culture on your side can seriously damage your popularity.”
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