Jane Clifton: The US election and when stardust turns to ashes

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Sleb pile-on: Oprah Winfrey backed Kamala Harris, which may have done more harm than good. Photo / Getty Images
Much has rightly been made of the stonking failure of some of the world’s most-beloved celebrities to sway the US election – but could we be on to something potentially useful from this outrage?

On the face of it, it seems perverse that Taylor Swift, who can measurably affect the
inflation rate of countries she performs in and whose audiences’ stomping can register on seismic monitors, couldn’t outgun a septuagenarian convicted felon with the complexion of an anaemic traffic cone.

How is it possible that Oprah Winfrey, who has monopolised audiences of staggering demographic breadth for decades – convincing people to read improving books and try to be better humans, and making a Forbes-notifiable fortune in the process – could fail to dent support for a serial abuser of women and sometime bigot?
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. But now it’s the actual deities themselves – Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Julia Roberts – left demented by the defiance of mere mortals, aka voters.
Who’s to say, but Elvis could have descended from a cloud to endorse Kamala Harris and Donald Trump might even have wiped the floor with Him.
It may lack taste to drag blameless civil rights campaigner Rita Mae Brown into this, but she defined insanity as repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Realistically, we should have hit peak celebrity wipe-out in politics in 2002, when Elmo from The Muppets appeared before a US congressional committee to lobby for education funding. To be fair, he also tried to eat the microphone, which may stand as a resonant statement, at least for the nihilists and anarchists among us.
If not then, surely the allure of star-power politics should have expired when Sally Field, Jane Fonda and Sissy Spacek testified to Congress about farm workers’ rights on the grounds that they’d played farmers’ wives in movies.
Should we not have called a halt after Sharon Stone attempted to promote peace in the Middle East in 2006 and, not to put too fine a point on it, did not succeed?
Alas, stardust memories fade rather than tarnish, so the US election became a Glastonbury/Feed the World sleb pile-on, which may have done more harm than good. A telling insight came from YouGov polling after Swift endorsed Harris. While 8% felt more inclined to vote for Harris, a strapping 20% said the endorsement made them less likely to do so.
The psychology of this is manifold, but one obvious strain is: Stay in your lane. You’re my entertainer, not my political adviser.
Other crashingly obvious reasons that celebrities don’t move votes include the massive disparity between their lives and most voters’, and democracy’s obliviousness to factors such as dimples, exceptional ball skills, clever jokes, sublime music, brilliant writing and even, as it unthinkably transpires, Meryl Streep. For better and – as seems likely just now – for worse, it would appear most voters only suffer their opinions to be cajoled, wheedled, bounced or bullied by actual politicians who have some chance of being held to account for their advocacy.
What solace might be dredged from this mass defeat of our would-be exemplars? They’ll be feeling like proper Charlies right now, but that 20% celebrity dissuasion factor that YouGov divined may point the way. That is a result-changing margin. Theoretically, a politician who gets the A-listers to suck up to their opponents could swing things decisively their way. Could celebs game this in future by nobly using their talents contrarily?
It would have been the acting assignment from hell, but had George Clooney, Arnie, Lady Gaga et al been convincingly all over Trump, we might be looking at a different world today.
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