Alan Gutierrez

Microsoft has released a new advertisement, after the Jerry Sienfeld and Bill Gates advertisements (Shoe Circus, A Family Affair), which had the look and feel of sitcom spun-off of the Seinfeld TV Show of yesteryear. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Jerry and Bill go from one ordinary domestic setting to the next, brining their own brand (Jerry’s brand) of humor with them. One episode even had an entire sitcom family.

These were generally referred to as the commercials about nothing.

Now the advertising has made a preposterous leap to an incredibly defensive ad campaign.

The ad is passive-aggressive with a chilly tone of righteous indignation. I recalls the haughty politically correct types that I’d encounter in Ann Arbor. You might be talking about the Atlanta Braves when someone at the table says, “Well, my great grandfather was half Chippewa Native-American,” and glowers at you. Everyone stops talking about baseball and starts talking about nothing.

They start with a John Hodgeman look alike saying, “I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype.” Then they run through a litany of people who say that they are a PC, but they are not hip, they wear glasses, they study genes, they are not human doings but human beings, and they are all PCs.

Immediately, I recalled Principal Blackman’s You’re A Racist educational film from Strangers With Candy, the comedy that parodied the after school specials that are so familiar to me as a television weened child of the 80’s. (The video is available. Please click play.)

The ad campaign fails for me because of this overlay. More after the jump.
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I am a Democrat. I am a supporter of Barack Obama. I want Barack Obama to win the election and become President of the United States.

Which is why I’m so happy to see Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. When I watched the clip above, I was able to laugh out loud at Sarah Palin for the first time. Much needed.

It was a fun and clever satire of the accusations of sexism that have been bandied about in the two weeks since Sarah Palin’s debut.

What I like most of all about the SNL skit is that it completely deflated Sarah Palin. For two weeks, Sarah Palin, marched forward with a message of wide-eyed denial about every aspect of her record, defended by a phalanx of operatives who labeled all inquiries into her abilities as sexist. As it seemed that she would get away with, there were the early stages of Bush Derangement Syndrome setting in among the Democratic faithful, a condition that is often fatal for Democratic political campaigns.
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