Can Obama Overcome the Urkel Effect?

Friday, Oct. 31, 2008
Can Obama Overcome the Urkel Effect?
By Joel Stein
Time Magazine

I am not at all concerned about the Bradley effect--the theory that secretly racist white people tell pollsters they'll vote for a black candidate like Barack Obama but will actually pull the lever for a white one like John McCain. The truth is that secretly racist white people happily vote for black candidates, listen to black musicians and laugh at black comedians to make themselves feel better about not having black friends. In fact, I once even tried to get all the way through Barbershop.

I am, however, deeply worried about the Urkel effect, which holds that voters leaning toward Obama will walk into the voting booth and suddenly think, I cannot take four years of listening to that giant-eared nerd. Because people are starting to realize that Obama is not all that cool. He's earnest like C-3PO, emotionless like Spock, overly practical like Encyclopedia Brown and incredibly skinny like C-3PO, Spock and Encyclopedia Brown.

Obama seemed cool at first because he uses slang, dresses well and bumps fists. But a lifetime of dangerous undercover work makes it easy for me to spot a fellow nerd. Obama has done a good job passing, with his nice suits, easy smile and attractive wife. But those are just the over-30 nerd trappings of success. Have you seen him try to dance? It's like watching a white guy make fun of other white guys. Sure, he played high school basketball, but how many cool kids play indoor sports in Hawaii? The man is all superego. He never gets angry or flirts with hot chicks by asking them to be his Vice President. Obama has written about using pot and cocaine, but a New York Times article found only school buddies who said he merely dabbled with marijuana. That's because the only people who bring up their drug use didn't really do drugs. Try asking George W. Bush about alleged cocaine use. You'll see how the nonnerds play it.

The Urkel effect has damaged most of the last generation of Democratic presidential candidates, so I figured I'd have its horrors explained by Michael Dukakis. "The guy I was running against was chewing on pork rinds during the campaign," said Dukakis. "I don't think George H.W. Bush had had a pork rind in his life. They did that number on me, and I did a much less effective job than Obama did. I was kind of the bloodless technocrat, right? If I had a nickel for every guy who said, 'You're nothing like the guy on television,' I'd be a millionaire." Then Dukakis spent 15 minutes telling me about the importance of precinct-by-precinct campaigning, thereby saving me a nickel.

Former TIME reporter Benjamin Nugent, author of American Nerd: The Story of My People, is also worried about the Urkel effect, though he thinks Obama is less nerd than nerd-adjacent. These are the types of terms you have to endure when talking to the author of American Nerd: The Story of My People. "He would be the guy the jocks didn't choose to towel-snap, but he would kind of stand there looking disapproving while they towel-snapped. Whereas McCain would be more likely to towel-snap you, and Sarah Palin would make out with the guy who towel-snapped you," he says.

To find out how Obama can save himself before it's too late, I consulted the reigning geek of our time, John Hodgman, who plays PC in the Apple ads and wrote a new book called More Information Than You Require. Hodgman thinks that while the Urkel effect hurt Al Gore and John Kerry, America's lack of desire to drink even a malty Belgian beer with Obama will actually help him. "After eight years of jocklike bluster, Obama's technician's calm seems extra-attractive," says Hodgman, who believes that jocks vs. geeks has replaced red vs. blue as the reigning cultural conflict of the day. But jockdom, he says, is on the wane. "The world is now driven by knowledge economies. China and India and Dubai do not make Big Bang--theory sitcoms marginalizing their geeks and engineers--unless they actually do, in which case, awesome!"

Maybe Hodgman is right. Maybe Obama won't fall victim to the Urkel effect. Maybe, just as Seth Rogen has replaced Harrison Ford as a romantic-movie lead, our comic-book-loving, viral-video-sharing culture is replacing the blow-dried Mitt Romneys with the Jew-froed Al Frankens. Of course, it's also possible that while our society is ready to accept a black President, it still clings to a treasured stereotype: that all black people are cool and all nerds are white.

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