Nigeria Content Online

At the beginning of
his much, much, much discussed visit to ‘The View,’ Barack Obama
squished himself into a long, low banquette where the five women who
converse on the program were seated.

“These couches were made for these little people,” he complained mildly.

I cannot tell you
how happy this moment made me. During the presidential campaign,
whenever Obama was sharing a stage with Hillary Clinton,the seating
arrangement always seemed to involve high stools. He draped his tall,
lanky frame over his stool gracefully. Clinton, who would have looked
like a middle-aged schoolgirl doing detention if she perched up there,
opted to stand and be uncomfortable.

On behalf of all
the short women of America I say – go for it, women of ‘The View.’ I’m
sure you did not want to cause the president of the United States any
distress, but he was so totally due.

“For the first time
in American history, a sitting president is visiting a daytime talk
show – us,” Whoopi Goldberg said proudly. The only real innovation was
the hour of the day. ‘The View’ isn’t any less serious than ‘The David
Letterman Show,’ where the president has guested. It’s not as if he
volunteered to have himself shut up in the ‘Big Brother’ house, or sent
Joe Biden to play wooden spoons on ‘America’s Got Talent.’

The dissolution of
the boundary between entertainment and politics is old news. Now we’re
dissolving the boundary between reality and entertainment. Or perhaps
reality and reality. I was reminded of this when Obama was gently
grilled by the lone Republican on ‘The View,’ Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who
came to the show after a stint on ‘Survivor,’ where she lasted 39 days
in the Australian Outback despite a crippling inability to catch fish.

‘Survivor’ is a
first-generation reality show, in which everything is actually supposed
to be real, except for the unseen production crew and copious editing.
Now, some of the most talked-about shows on television are programs
like ‘Real Housewives’ and ‘Jersey Shore,’ that capture real people
going about their real lives – except the producers arrange things so
that the real lives are much more interesting than they are in reality.

‘Jersey Shore’ is
basically Mario Cuomo’s nightmare. It stars a bunch of young people who
call themselves “guidos” and “guidettes” and live out every dreadful
Italian-American stereotype in beach houses provided by the producers.
On ‘The View,’ Obama claimed he had never heard of the show’s breakout
star, Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi. But it turned out that he once made a
joke about Snooki, listing her and House Minority Leader John Boehner
as the top victims of the administration’s plan to help pay for the
health bill with a tanning salon tax.

Snooki, whose hard
partying got her hauled off to the pokey Friday, has added the
president’s line to her own repertoire. “I don’t go tanning-tanning
anymore because Obama put a 10 percent tax on tanning,” she said in
this week’s episode. “McCain would never put a 10 percent tax on
tanning. Because he’s pale and would probably want to be tan.”

She was interviewed
recently on the website The Daily Beast by Meghan McCain, daughter of
John, who asked her how she felt when she received a Twitter message
from the Arizona senator, confirming his strong opposition to taxing
tanning beds.

“So that was pretty awesome and I’m really happy that he actually knows who I am,” Snooki said.

We may be moving
beyond actors running for office, into a new era with candidates who
became TV stars by playing artificially enhanced versions of
themselves. In Wisconsin, the seat of retiring House Appropriations
Chairman David Obey could be taken by a local Republican district
attorney named Sean Duffy. His prior claims to fame include a stint on
the reality show ‘Real World Boston.’ His wife, Rachel, was a star of
‘Real World San Francisco.’ They found love in the spinoff.

Now, Rachel
sometimes sits in for Elisabeth Hasselbeck on ‘The View.’ In his
pre-presidency, Obama made a guest appearance on the wrestling show
“Raw” during the 2008 primaries and mimicked one of the stars, Dwayne
“The Rock” Johnson. Like everybody in the pseudosport, Johnson was part
of a scripted soap opera in which he played a wrestler named Dwayne
“The Rock” Johnson. Among the other characters were the philandering
league owner, Vince McMahon, played by owner Vince McMahon, and his
long-suffering wife, Linda.

Linda McMahon is now running for the U.S. Senate. Dwayne Johnson is an actor who recently starred as the tooth fairy. Really.

And, of course,
Barack Obama became president and appeared this week on ‘The View.’
There, he denied knowing the identity of Snooki, who plays a woman
named Snooki on ‘Jersey Shore,’ where she recently criticized his
revenue sources for health care reform.

Compared to this, ‘Inception’ is a simple tale of people who enjoy napping.

© 2010 New York Times News Service