And she's gunning for McCain!!
Hold the presses: feather-brained celebrity may not be so feather-brained after all. The socialite Paris Hilton has now mocked John McCain with a retaliatory "campaign ad" – and it could just be funnier than its inspiration, the Republican presidential candidate's spot likening his rival Barack Obama to herself and her fellow denizen of the gossip columns Britney Spears.
Like the McCain ad, Hilton's offering opens with a narrator. The original describes Mr Obama as "the biggest celebrity in the world". In the Hilton comeback, Mr McCain is dubbed "the oldest celebrity in the world". At which point enter the lady herself, reclining in a skimpy swimsuit on a white beach chair.
The interplay of politics and celebrity are always hard to read – and never more so than in the lull between the primaries and the start of the real action when the candidates announce their vice-presidential running mates, and the conventions kick off the autumn campaign proper.
But it is at least conceivable that Mr McCain's gambit may backfire against him. For one thing, the placing of Mr Obama in an unholy trinity of celebrity alongside Ms Hilton and Ms Spears has run into a volley of maternal criticism. Even Roberta McCain, the candidate's redoubtable 96-year-old mother, has described the ad as "kinda stupid". More scathing still was Kathy Hilton, proud parent of Paris, and who also happens to be a McCain donor. "A complete waste of the country's time and attention at the very moment when millions of people are losing their homes and their jobs," she fulminated in an article posted on the liberal website, The Huffington Post. "It was a completely frivolous way to choose the next president of the United States."
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