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August 10, 2021

Meet the White House's new vaccine 'influencer'

By Monica Showalter

Remember Pajama Boy, the onesie-clad man with hot chocolate who was hired by Obama White House allies to get young people to buy the Obamacare and its 'narrative'?

Well, now it's Benny Drama.

He's the new pop face of the Biden administration's bid to persuade the public to get vaccines.

According to the Daily Mail:

In a bid to promote Covid-19 vaccines among young people, the White House has recruited Gen Z TikTok influencers, one who dropped another spoof video on Monday. 

Benito Skinner, a comedian whose TikTok handle is @bennydrama7 and boasts over 845,000 followers, posted a video Monday which featured 'A day in my life as a White House intern <3,' after the trend popular on the social media app. 

The video was also posted to Instagram and Twitter.  

When I first saw it, I wondered if it was some conservative parody. But nope, it's real, complete with Jen Psaki in her general unpleasantness, serving as a foil for the act. That moves us on to what it is -- an ad for the Biden administration, targeted at young people, supposedly through satire. But as satire, it falls flat because the Biden administration hiring a person like this is perfectly believable.  It actually looks exactly like someone the Bidenites would hire as an intern at the White House, and they probably do.

As might be expected, the video didn't go down well with the public. Here are some choice tweet reactions:

Image: Twitter screen shot

 

Don Trump, Jr. had a couple of resonant snorts:

Someone else supported that point with this:

 I've written about that here.

As for Trump supporters who also are vaccine-hesitant, well, recall that Psaki had them pinned down nice and stereotypical -- to her, Trump-voting vaccine-hesitants are simple-minded NASCAR fans. So they'll be sure to go for this latest TikTok ad, right?

So the question remains as to what they are trying to do.....

What's obvious here is that the White House isn't terribly serious about COVID or getting vaccines with this sort of approach. They're trying to be hip, or with-it, as Biden might have heard in the '60s. In this regard, they resemble the Obama administration, which brought in characters like that woman who took milk baths with Froot Loops. Remember her? All satire, you see. Yet at the same time, it's queasy making to mainstream America to see it coming from the highest office of the land. They can't persuade people otherwise? That says something.

What's more, "messaging" like this will repel black and Hispanic vaccine-hesitant. Are those voters going to be excited about a cossetted rich kids playing the stereotypical fop?

Will it persuade Trump voters who are vaccine-hesitant, out in middle America? Don't think so. More likely, its objective is to mainstream the marginal, and better still, stick it to conservatives and rally the left for fundraising.

Libertarian pundit Megan McArdle put her finger on it when she observed about the Pajama Boy ads:  "The purpose of Pajama Boy is not to get people to buy health insurance, but to get a rise out of conservatives — and thereby to engage the solidaristic, money-raising, meme-spreading power of OFA’s liberal base." 

Now Biden's doing it, harder and crazier than Obama ever could.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, as Karl Marx used to say, so here we are.

Image: Twitter screen shot

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