The 2008 presidential campaign has now made a connection, albeit a negative one, to pop culture; a spokesperson for Senator John McCain has tied supporters of Senator Barack Obama to #1 RPG Dungeons and Dragons. In a post on the McCain Website on Monday, Michael Goldfarb wrote, “It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons and Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.” The post was responding to a blog on Daily Kos in which McCain’s story of a Vietnamese prison camp guard drawing a cross in the dirt is tied to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s similar story from the Soviet Gulag.
This isn’t the first time McCain spokesperson Goldfarb has inexplicably used Dungeons and Dragons as a “negative” association. In early August, he compared the editors of the New York Times to a blogger “sitting at home in his mother’s basement and ranting into the ether between games of Dungeons and Dragons.”