Opinion: As Dems meet, Madonna endorses John McCain, among others?

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Normally The Ticket doesn’t write much about M. Louise Ciccone. A native of some tank town in Michigan, the 50-year-old woman has never accomplished anything politically. Never run for elective office. And shows no interest in doing so.

Although if she was as successful getting votes as she is selling her music and a few of her movies, Madonna could no doubt win any electoral runoff.

Our momentary interest in this ironically named personality stems from her new music tour, not the ‘Confessions’ tour and not the ‘Give It To Me’ tour.

We’re talking about her new ‘Sticky and Sweet’ tour, which launched this past weekend before 40,000 adoring fans in Cardiff, Wales. The concert, the first of 50 scheduled so far for this trip, goes on for two entire hours with eight costume changes, 250 crew members and 24 songs, including some new tunes and reworked old ones.

If we hadn’t still been awaiting the ‘Joe Biden is VP’ text message on our cellphone, we’d have been there for certain.

However, during a musical interlude in the song ‘Get Stupid,’ news reports say the show has a rapid-fire video presentation on large screens to keep the audience from leaving. In the course of this video melange there are pictures of destruction and global warming, obviously a kind of symbolic audience reminder of how lucky they are to have paid a fortune for their ticket and to be there safe and healthy on a noisy summer’s night.

But then, get this, the successful pop star appears to endorse for president of the United States Arizona Sen. John McCain. He is about to accept the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in St. Paul, which is not in Michigan.

McCain’s picture (not the one of him as a war POW) is flashed up on the screen, much larger than life, certainly bigger than any TV commercial image of the 71-year-old former pilot on this side of the Atlantic where people can actually vote for him.

Such publicity for and political endorsement of a conservative Republican by Madonna is somewhat surprising, even for a pop star who works so hard so successfully to engender controversies and stay in the public eye.

So many other show biz personalities seem to lean more on the liberal side. You might instead expect them and her to predictably favor liberal Democrat Barack Obama, if they do follow American politics.

Trust good old Madonna to shatter everyone’s expectations by endorsing a conservative.

But wait! There’s more.

The Material Girl appears to be even more conservative than that. Because along with McCain’s photo, her video show also flashes up pictures of Robert Mugabe, the tough-guy president of Zimbabwe, and Adolf Hitler, who was chancellor of Nazi Germany for some years during McCain’s childhood and even before the aging Madonna Louise Ciccone was born.

Who’d have expected the pop star to endorse three such different figures from three different continents in her new show? But there you have it. That’s international show biz for ya. There just doesn’t seem to be any other credible explanation.

--Andrew Malcolm

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