ArcaMax

Why do politicians care so much for celebrity endorsements? In a word: connections. Just as talk about sports or soap operas gives strangers something inoffensive to talk about in elevators and hair salons, pop culture offers politicians a way to connect emotionally with us voters even before we find out what they believe.

The country's sociopolitical divides and culture wars are matched perfectly by the variety of worlds depicted in the surprisingly successful genre of unscripted television.

We see this play out in the way conservatives, for example, criticize the Obama White House for including the rapper Common in a cultural event, only to find themselves defending Phil Robertson of "Duck Dynasty" for ridiculing homosexuals, among others, in an interview that not only was unscripted but unedited by the program's producers.

Welcome to the world of "Hicksploitation" television, as The Daily Beast recently called it, or "Red State reality TV" as the Washington Post tagged it. It is a world in which politicians exploit the values of rural Americans for votes in the way that hicksploitation -- or "hixploitation," according to Wikipedia -- in movies brought us a genre as varied as the classy "Walking Tall" (1973) or the trashy classic "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974), to name a few of the titles listed under "Hixploitation" on the fan site called Grindhouse Database.

Inevitably in today's media age, this world spilled over into a political culture that has turned running for president into a stepping stone, for many people, on their way to such powerful posts as TV talk show host. We even saw the two worlds of politics and pop culture collide in TLC's short-lived "Sarah Palin's Alaska."

But just as it serves the purpose of politicians to seek the backing of pop culture icons, it serves their opponents and critics to exploit those icons' embarrassments.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.