The PC is Clinton is Wile E. Coyote

Andrew Sullivan collected a few nuggets yesterday, here and here, comparing the choice between Clinton and Obama to the now well-known Mac vs. PC ads. And as the Noam Cohen article points out, the analogy doesn’t actually bode well for Obama’s electoral fortunes, given that Mac remains a niche computer. But I would take it further.

Now, this is a theory culled purely from personal conversation, anecdote, etc – I don’t have any hard data to back it up – but I suspect that upon seeing these ads, most people, including Mac users, wind up rooting for John Hodgman’s nerdy PC guy and absolutely loathing Justin Long’s Mac hipster. Lord knows I do. It resembles the Wile E. Coyote effect, I think. The presumptive protagonist comes off as smug and subtly cruel, while the antagonist begins to evoke sympathy as a constantly put upon everyman. (To give credit where its due, Seth Stevenson made a similar point in Slate back in mid 2006.)

It turns out the cartoon’s creators intended for your sympathies to lie with poor old Sisyphean Wile. But that they knew what they were doing, while the Mac vs. PC spots appear intended in all earnestness, simply throws the ads’ profound obtuseness into sharper relief. So it’s kinda sad when Doug Kendall suggests that one of the questions inspired by switching from PC to Mac (and thus from Clinton to Obama) is, “Am I cool enough for a Mac?” Am I cool enough? Are you kidding me?!

You have to be a bit of an ass to watch those ads and think to yourself that the Mac kid is pretty hip while that PC dweeb is just a total loser, not to mention attempting the dicey application of that dynamic to the Democratic nomination race. As long as we’re running with this analogy, thin as it may be, it’s worth remembering that the working class base of the Democrats, of which neither Sullivan, Kendall, Cohen nor myself am a part, and which consists overwhelmingly of PC users, thus being very not cool, has been breaking heavily for Clinton. So they’d better hope the “Obama is a Mac” analogy turns out to be off. Because if it isn’t, and if the Wile E. Coyote effect holds, Obama could be in for a serious trouncing. Or permanently associated with Justin Long and that bloody bird, which is arguably even worse.

~ by Jeff on February 7, 2008.