Obama's 'Life of Julia' Was Made to Be Mocked
It has easy-to-manipulate Web graphics, an oversimplified narrative, and hits a political hot spot: Barack Obama's new campaign tool The Life of Julia was apparently built specifically to be co-opted by right wing meme-makers.
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If you haven't seen it yet, The Life of Julia is a Web slideshow that shows a fictional everywoman named Julia at various stages of her life, and explains how Obama's policies would help her and Romney's would hurt her. Since the so-called "war on women" is also a war for women voters, Julia is going to be one of Obama's tools to lure them. Give the campaign credit for being well-designed and computer-savvy, but the thing is absolutely ripe for mocking.
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The Twitter guns of people like Michelle Malkin ("I will read Life of Julia to my kids to show them how NOT to live their lives -- tethered to Nanny State") and The National Review correspondent Jim Geraghty ("at age 68, death panels finally catch up with Julia"), are already blazing. Politico has a longer list of anti- #Julia tweets if you're so inclined.
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Now we're starting to see some more developed Life of Julia parodies such as Joel Pollak's, about his wife Julia, on Breitbart.com. It's not that Pollak is particularly clever in his rebuttal, but this campaign was just built to be co-opted. It's so easy: You just take a character, give your own version of an "under Obama" and "under Romney" scenario for each part of her life, and hit "publish."
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The real fun's going to start when we get more altered graphics, like this one from Soopermexican, which isn't a work of genius or anything, but gets credit for the early photoshop work and totally proving the point that Life of Julia is very low-hanging fruit.
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From Life of Julia:
From Soopermexican's parody:
Mocking Julia: So easy! Actually coming up with something funny to say: Distinctly harder.
