McCain: 'Celeb'

The McCain camp keeps bringing the mockery, and tries to use Obama's celebrity status against him.

Celebrity is, indeed, a key axis of this campaign. Both men are bona fide celebrities, but Obama's wattage offers both an opportunity -- see the cover of People -- and a risk. The question is whether he can keep finding ways (notably, access) to keep the celebrity press in the business of making people feel closer to him, in the Bonnie Fuller model, or whether he becomes -- as this ad portrayes him -- a distant, hard to identify with, figure.

ALSO: There's a claim in the ad that Obama "will raise taxes on electricity," which I'm sure will be much hashed over today. The McCain camp's backup is Obama's comment, this February, to a San Antonio paper that "what we ought to tax is dirty energy, like coal and, to a lesser extent, natural gas."

He was responding to a question about taxing wind energy; I haven't seen the plan to tax coal -- the main source of electricity in America -- anywhere in his formal plans, but he clearly did suggest it in that interview.

Polifact looked into this a bit, and has more.