Shaken by celebrity-wannabe Sen. John McCain’s paranoid jealousy of his A-list address book, and the TV attack ad it recently generated, Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, has invited the Arizona Republican to “get down” with a gaggle of luminaries who gather to goof around at his basketball/backgammon/pilates weekends at Oprah Winfrey’s place and other retreats.
“It might cheer the senator up to rub shoulders with Oscar winners and Nobel Prize laureates and some of my pals from the N.F.L.,” Obama speculated. “I think he’d get a special kick out of the Sarkozys. They rock!”
Obama aides have also sent out VIP passes for the likely Republican nominee and his posse to attend Mick Jagger’s baby shower for Angelina Jolie in Monte Carlo next week. Perhaps out of embarrassment, the McCain camp countered by inviting Obama to a round of golf with their candidate plus former Vice President Dan Quayle, the 1998 Miss Teenage Mormon and “a top pro bowler,” in a country club near Phoenix.
The Obama campaign is rumored to be pulling out all the celebrity hospitality stops, not only out of pity, but also in hopes that McCain will respond by canceling a second celebrity TV attack ad. This one alleged features Roman Polanski, Fatty Arbuckle and Pee Wee Herman.
A reflective Obama told the reporters traveling on his private Falcon Jet, loaned by best-bud Tiger Woods, “I guess I’d be jealous too if my posse was Dom DeLuise, Florence Henderson and Jim Belushi.” He put his Blackberry on hold – family-friend Jack Nicholson was checking in on crony Warren Beatty’s impromptu Vegas lounge act with the Dalai Lama and Cher the previous night – to express his sympathy for the elderly Republican.
“I’m sure all good Democrats feel for the old gentleman,” he added. “But I’m a man of hope. So I’d say to the senator, it’s never too late to get a life.”
Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of “All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall” and “Zany Afternoons.”