THE BACKLASH
That video was met with immediate backlash. It dropped on “Jobs Day,” when the latest dismal unemployment figures were released, and Republicans immediately seized on what the New York Times described as the not “ideal” timing to produce a counter video. “Meanwhile” (the title of the video) runs the recently released unemployment stats underneath Wintour’s campaign video for Obama. The Atlantic Wire praised it for being a “pretty good skewering of a very skewerable person.”

And from there the Republican backlash continued. John Podhoretz at the New York Post slammed Wintour’s involvement with the campaign in a piece titled, “Team O Turns Tone Deaf.” Glenn Beck obviously got in on the Wintour/Obama bashing, calling the Obama campaign “out of touch” and Wintour “the devil” (he also thinks she’s American and had fun mocking her accent).

Sarah Wildman, a fellow at Johns Hopkins’ International Reporting Project who covers US politics for PBS and the BBC, calls the video a “tactical error.” “I think unfortunately for the Obama campaign this came at the worst moment,” she told us. “The day the unemployment numbers are released and to use this women who is a face of the wealthiest of the wealthy in a lot of respects…her world is so rarified…it’s just a tactical error.”