LIBERTAS has an interesting post about how that Will.I.Am “Yes We Can” Obama video––in which celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Kate Walsh sing over and mug in front of Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary “concession” speech––is emblematic of a new kind of Hollywood political support. Dirty Harry riffs on a post by Jim Geraghty, who notes that the clip’s “substance-free message of ‘yes we can, unity is good, we have hope and the hopes of children are important’” is unobjectionable “because there’s no ideas in it; it’s entirely emotion.” He goes on to say that aligning oneself with that emotion is less a political action than participation in a “pop-culture phenomnenon.”And because pop culture is something American’s know how to participate in without thinking, by extension Barack Obama becomes the ready-made candidate for those who can’t really handle much more than passive consumption of an image as a stand-in for a feeling.

Dirty Harry actually sees this as a good thing. He likes the idea of ” a quiet advocacy from Hollywood for their guy (or gal)” because it stands in contrast to previous celebrity-led political spectacles, in which stars “have hurt their own careers and the candidate they want elected saying unbelievably stupid things.” But writing about the “Yes I Can’ video at NewTeeVee, Wagner James Au couldn’t disagree more…

…it’s an appalling exercise in celebrity self-congratulation, reducing the Senator’s soaring plea for optimistic unity into an opportunity for some popstars to preen in front of the camera… [It’s] easy to see how this clip’s growing popularity can’t be good for the Obama campaign: after spending months fighting the criticism that their candidate has great rhetoric but little experience, here comes a viral video that seems specifically designed to derail their efforts…Memo to politically active celebrities: if you actually want your candidate to win, how about coming up with viral videos that actually serve his campaign, and not yourselves?

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a thing about the Obama Girl videos, in which I pegged their total lack of substance as intrinsic to their effectiveness in an election in which the transfer of information between YouTube and CNN seems to be much more important than the transfer of a message from a candidate to a voter. “There’s absolutely nothing to ‘get’ about Obama Girl, beyond the image of a hot girl in a bikini gyrating in front of an image of the presidential candidate, and that core ‘message’ is absolutely tailor-made for the über-reductive 24-hour news loop. If there was actually any there there, it would be too much content for cable news.”

There’s no sense that real-life Obama Girl Scarlett Johannson’s support for the candidate goes any deeper than the character of Obama Girl, nor does it seem to transcend any of the other cultural totems she’s collaged into her starlet identity. Scarlett Johansson hooks up with Benicio Del Toro in elevators, she sings back up for the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella, she supports Obama. When she made her now-famous “I’m engaged to Barack Obama!” comment last month, it was a knee-jerk defense in an effort to deflect a question about her actual personal life.

So the question seems to be: is “Yes I Can” a net positive for Obama, because Americans are stupid image junkies who are far more likely to respond to a slickly-packaged dose of emotion than an actual political message? Or is it a net negative because the jig is super-close to being up, and the ScarJo factor only puts more pressure on Obama to actually deliver something of substance beyond mass affirmation?

Certainly, there seems to be a growing fear among more pragmatic Obama supporters that this is a media spectacle that can’t last. As Alex Balk put it earlier today, “while it’s great to inspire and symbolism is important, particularly with where we find ourselves in the world’s eyes right now, you’re not gonna make it through four years on hope alone. Audacity, maybe, but not hope.”