Then when it was rumored this summer that Clooney was offering Obama foreign-policy advice, Clooney furiously denied it in a statement: "I have never texted or emailed Sen. Obama. And I'll offer a million dollars to anyone who could prove otherwise. In fact, I've only talked to the senator once in the last year and a half on the phone I would hope that my friend John McCain would join me in condemning this kind of politics."

Translation wasn't necessary: Please don't ruin Obama by associating him with me.

The stars of rap music have been trying to keep their names and faces out of the Obama publicity as well. Vibe magazine lined up a list of hip-hoppers to express their opinions on Obama. Rapper Brad Jordan, who commercially goes by the name "Scarface," was blunt: "Hip hop needs to shut the f--- up right now to get Obama elected."

It appears Camp Obama has sent a message to Camp Hollywood. Keep it down, for now. The last thing he wants is for their radical agenda to be seen as his radical agenda.

Celebrities might also have been watching what happened to Oprah Winfrey, the billionaire Queen of Daytime, after she lent her whopping women's appeal on the campaign trail. She oozed over Obama as "The One," the untouchable leader of the new generation.

But her ratings declined, and her partisan activism eroded her approval ratings: Pollsters found her favorables fell from 74 to 55 percent. An AOL survey of 1.3 million Americans that found 46 percent said the daytime TV host who "made their day" was Ellen DeGeneres, while only 19 percent chose Oprah. Faced with all this, Winfrey retreated to a less activist role, foregoing her traditional role in the last several cycles of interviewing both party nominees on her show when the fall season kicked into gear.

The celebrity aversion to adding their glitzy names to the list of famous people associated with Barack Obama shows something obvious. Celebrities are out of touch with mainstream America, and they know it.