As a piece of cinema, Game Change is no game changer; it's as a well-crafted and
sturdily conventional as its HBO TV-movie predecessors. However, it is one of
the most radical adaptations you'll see in a while. The non-fiction
novel on which it is based, an impressive work of cultural reportage by Mark
Halperin and John Heilleman, was almost George R.R. Martin-esque in it's
obsessive expansiveness. At the heart of the piece was the idea that far from
being a matter of Republican vs. Democrat, the 2008 election was a massive
shift in countless cultural paradigms that worked itself out in a messy,
dizzying tangle of cause and effect. The actual ballot-checking may have been
up to us, but what Halperin and Heilleman make clear is that this was a contest
decided not just by American voters, but by senators, ex-Presidents, media
personalities, crusading journalists, civil rights figures, fierce feminists,
Bible-belt preachers, black-power extremists, hockey moms, corporate czars and,
yes, one Katie Couric. Game Change
the movie is the story of the McCain-Palin campaign, plain and simple. The
multifarious perspectives that gave the book so much of its kick are mere
peripherals here, with Obama relegated to a cameo and Hillary dumped all
together. Yet, even if it ditches all of the novel's structure and most of its
spirit, it pulls off an impressive task; it assembles a straight-faced,
reasonably sympathetic interpretation of the rise, fall, and rebirth of
America's most powerful and polarizing moose hunter. Employing the eponymous
book, as well as interviews with several senior McCain-Palin campaign staffers,
screenwriter Danny Strong and director Jay Roach do something rather
unexpected; they play it straight. This is no Primary Colors-esque rumination on power, no Sorkinized riff on the
seedy backdoor politics of politics.
It doesn't ask, as many of us bewildered liberals did
in the midst of the Mama Grizzly madness, "How could this happen?!"
Propelled by a superfluous cast, it observes the events of Palin's VP run with
something resembling bemused curiosity. The picture takes its share of cheap
shots (one word: "O'Biden"), but it's also impressively earnest in
its desire to answer its true central question: "How did this happen?" That this approach works is in no small
part a testament to the skill, precision, and sheer gumption of the eternally
underrated Julianne Moore, who is, simply put, as great as you'd expect and
then some. Her red hair darkened to a rootsy brown, her earthy alto swooping up
into heretofore unheard octaves of sing-songy Ah-leeya-skun, she nails the down-home swagger that made Palin
such a hit on the campaign trail, as well as the barely suppressed
fish-out-of-water neurosis that made voters think twice at the ballot box.
Perhaps most impressively, she keys into Palin's more compassionate side, into
the radiant, unforced sense of sugar-cookie maternity, which allowed her to
parlay an inarguably genuine love of faith, family, and country into a brand
spankin' new political archetype--the Ultimate Concerned Parent, if you will.
Whether she's shaking hands on the campaign trail or treading water in that
infamous Couric interview, Moore strives not for cheap impersonation, but for
alchemy. The result is a remarkably calibrated, even empathetic performance
that gives us striking glimpses of what Palin might've been thinking and
feeling and, by doing so, recenters a national figure who has been long
oversimplified, slotted into the binary opposition of warrior patriot or
uninformed hockey mom.
That said, the movie's not afraid to question the woman's
competency, entrusting that task to aspiring President McCain (Ed Harris,
subdued and startlingly accurate) and to a string of campaign aides and
advisers who also serve as a handily politicized Greek chorus. There's the
husband and wife team (Ron Livingston, Sarah Paulson) who doubt Palin's
credentials from the get go, the lawyer who vets her (Brian D'Arcy James), the
consultant they bring in to brush up her foreign policy and withstand media
scrutiny (Colby French). And, at the head of it all, there's Woody Harrelson's
Steve Schmidt, the embattled campaign veteran who believes in Palin's potential
as a high-risk, high-reward candidate, but steadily morphs into her greatest
critic. As a man exhilarated by Palin's rhetorical fireworks and then bowled
over by her dangerously persistent flightiness, his character's journey of
disillusionment mirrors the one many of us took during those last months of the
elections, when the VP wannabe's approval ratings plummeted so steeply. He
turns in an agile, exquisite slow-burn of a performance, navigating Schmidt's
bumpy descent from country-first idealism to businesslike frustration to an
incredulity too far-reaching and deep-seated for words. When he finally goes
off on Palin on election night, it's not just the movie's most compelling
scene, it's a tragic microcosm of the modern political climate. In these five
shining minutes, the picture takes the temperature of our fevered two-party
culture, and gets one hell of an accurate reading.
These is acting at its finest.
Now where are the technical credentials to back these guys
up?
You've heard many a politician ask; why don't we have a
government as good as the people?
Well now, I'm curious: HBO, y u no have a crew as good as
the cast?
This isn't just a specific critique of Game Change--it's an issue I've had with almost every one of
HBO's made-for-TV movies. As their serialized shows prove week after week,
"made for TV" doesn't necessarily mean "cut-rate
production". Game of Thrones and True Blood boast a good cast and a
phenomenal sense of mood and mise en scene. Jay Roach does a decent job with
this one, but the director of Austin Powers and Tuck Everlasting doesn't do much but station the camera in front
of his actors and let them at it. Wouldn't this picture have benefited from a
director who really lured us into the campaign mania that drove Sarah mad?
Danny Strong does a nice job interspersing original dialogue with sound bites
and now-famed speeches, but, apart from the aforementioned Schmidt-Palin
meltdown scene, do any of his lines do half as much to hammer home what Palin
is thinking and feeling as Moore's most perfunctory glance? I think of the way
David Fincher's jittery edits ratcheted up Jesse Eisenberg's laser-sharp
anxiety in The Social Network,
the way Peter Morgan juxtaposed time, space, and location to turn Frost
v. Nixon's litany of facts into high drama.
Then I think of Game Change and
sigh. As with Something the Lord Made and You Don't Know Jack,
the actors aspire to greatness. The picture aspires to competence. B
That's the case with The Hunger Games has as well.
**
Now, for those of you who just got back from your vacation
to North Korea or chose hibernation as your chief hobby in the past half-decade,
The Hunger Games, based on the
blockbuster YA novel of the same name, takes place in Panem, a postwar
dystopia lorded over by a totalitarian capital. Years ago, when rebellion broke
out, the Capitol nuked one of Panem’s “districts” and forced the surviving ones
to compete in the Hunger Games, a vicious winner-takes-all embroglio where
government-selected competitors fight to the death on public television so as
to provide the entertainment-starved populace with some bloody
satisfaction--and to reinforce the iron-fisted strength of those who lord over
said populace. Oh, and did I mention the competitors are kids?
One of those kids, the aforementioned Katniss Everdeen, is
both the story's protagonist and its and the focal point of its popular appeal.
Handy with a bow but also vulnerable to the machinations of Cupid's arrow in
the form of fellow competitor Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), Katniss is refreshingly
complex addition to the often oversimplified gallery of modern pop culture
heroines. Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post hits the nail on the head
when she deems the character a
"transitional figure between the masochism of Bella Swan and the avenging
ferocity of Lisbeth Salander". Unlike mopey-mugged Bella or castrating
Lisbeth, Katniss is not easily mocked or conveniently classified. She struggles honestly and extensively with
real-life lady problems. The Hunger Games
are ostensibly masculine--violent, irrational, covetous of brute strength. Can
Katniss win them without totally losing sight of her emotions, her sensitivity
to others, her compassion for even her most dangerous enemies--her femininity?
Katniss's battle to stake out a place in an overtly masculine world without
straying from her fundamental femininity is all too familiar in this day and age.
Because this girl's fictional battle strikes a real-world nerve, she will
outlast her literary competitors. That's true of her cinematic ones as well,
due in no small part to Jennifer Lawrence, who own this movie so hard that they
might as well sign over everyone's salary to her and call it a day. Lawrence,
whose resume is chock-full of battle-hardened beauties (Ree in Winter's Bone,
Mystique in X-Men: First Class) slides into Katniss's skin with
astonishing ease, projecting her keen resourcefulness and sinewy resolve while
masterfully teasing out glimpses of an inner child forced into hiding. There's
a steely wit to her scenes with childhood friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth), and a
raw vulnerability in her moments with Hutcherson, who nails Peeta's appealing
sensitivity but misses his understated humour. Even her small solo scenes play
like effortlessly applied brushtrokes of illustrative detail, her most minute
gestures imbued with that unique, Katniss-y combination of a daughter's
tenderness and a hunter's certitude. As with Game Change, The Hunger Games is grounded by a powerful female performance. And,
as with Game Change, Woody Harrelson
provides top-notch support. As Haymitch, a washed-up, rum-sozzled former
victor who schools Peeta and Katniss in the rules of the games, Harrelson
approaches an innately showy role with appreciable nuance and empathy. His
boozy stupor is so morbidly, contagiously tragic that his sudden eruptions of
ration and reason have both comic and dramatic heft.
Once again, here's a
well-acted movie.
Once again, the actors
are underserved by the folks behind-the-scenes.
Stylistically speaking,
the movie isn't a total boondoggle. The grim conditions of District 12 are
rendered with a grainy, desaturated palette that makes the sense of
impoverishment startlingly concrete. And, when the film heads to le Capitol,
director Gary Ross eschews the fat-cat stereotypes and portrays the wealthy as
a deliciously gaudy blur of bad candy-colored fashion and odious personae.
Screenwriter Billy Ray helps Ross out by smartly economizing the backstory,
condensing some of Collins' lengthier exposition into a clever piece of Capitol
film propaganda. This picture is sleek, reliable, and thoughtfully assembled.
But so is the ceiling fan that's keeping me from schvitzing my head off as I
write this review. For all its faithful competence, something is missing from
The Hunger Games--not a brain, nor a heart, but a voice. Specifically,
Katniss's voice.
It's that voice that kept
the novels from turning into a glorified riff on Survivor. Because of the first-person narration, we were
effectively presented with three narratives at once; the actual games, the
televised coverage of said games, and Katniss's personal experience of the
games, which unearths the thoughts and emotions the cameras can't capture.
Those who write off the novels as oversimplified young adult hokum would do
well to appreciate the structural brilliance of this decision; by placing the
reader not alongside Katniss but inside her, Collins creates a whopper of
an emotional effect. We're repulsed by the infinite agonies of our heroine's
fight for survival, but, as with the people of Panem, we're just too compelled
by the intensity and insanity of the bloodshed to stop watching. It's like being
the gladiator and the Colosseum hordes all at once. Plus, there's just
something infinitely appealing about the style of the voice; plain-spoken,
light on wordplay, and heavy on brittle, battle-hardened declarations ("I
move into the range and give myself three arrows to get the job done"), it
sends the story hurtling from event to event with a ruthless efficiency that
makes JK Rowling look like a literary loiterer. The book feeds off the
narration; the movie deep-sixes it. It's an understandable move---movie
voiceovers are, more often than not, airheaded exercises in big-screen
redundancy. If you can show something, why say it aloud as well? Yet here, with
Katniss's voice effectively silenced, the movie loses that very qualities that
lifted the book above hundreds of other pieces of kiddie sci-fi drivel and
becomes, for all intents and purposes, a reasonably well-made action
flick.
Great adaptations start with a
familiar story and then attack it with a style all their own, yielding new
insights into an old narrative. For a recent example, look at how David Yates
used a deliberate slow-burn structure and a delicate attention to light and
shadows to locate untapped reserves of heartache and longing in Harry Potter
and the Half-Blood Prince. Now look at The
Hunger Games. It's not the bloody
sprint to the finish that the books were, but, couldn't it've been a futuristic
gladiatorial epic? A Kick-Ass-esque opus of delusional violence? An
imperiled love story to get the taste of Twilight out of our mouths? Hell, even the movie's
soundtrack offers an interesting possibility. Sculpted by roots-music
impresario T Bone Burnett, the album is chock-full of earthy folk-rock ballads
that play like accompaniment for a post-apocalyptic Western--a fascinating
approach to the material that's more emotionally charged and stylistically
stimulating than the actual movie. Find a moment in the film that conveys,
as forcefully as "Come Away to the Water", the horrid, hypnotic hold
the Games have on Panem, and on the contestants. Listen to 'Safe and
Sound", the lead single, and tell me which captures the wounded fragility
of the book's most prominent death better--the song or the movie scene. It is
worth mentioning that, right after that death, the movie makes its one major
deviation from the novel, an extended riot that, for once, pulsates with
genuine emotion. For a stunning moment, it takes on an unforgettable mood of
its own--it pulsates with the angry heart of the masses, becomes a trembling
threnody for lost freedom. All my bitching about voice and mood and tone may
seem overheated and snobby, but if the filmmakers can come together and make a
scene this raw, this focused, this great,
why should I settle for anything less in the picture's other two hours?
This is by no means a bad
movie. In fact, it is a pretty decent one. What it is, however, is a missed
opportunity, and not even the exemplary work of the radiant Ms. Lawrence can
blot out that fact. Later this year, Catching Fire starts production. Maybe this time, those involved
will adapt the source material not just faithfully, not just skillfully, but meaningfully. And, as a hopeful fan, I eagerly await a movie as good
as the soundtrack. C+
***
I'll say it again; these
movies aren't failures. What they do, they do pretty well. But the great
political drama of the New Millennium, the biggest teen fiction phenom since Harry
Potter--don't they deserve adaptations
as arresting, original, and unshakeable as the source material? Here we have
two singular cultural watersheds that made history by shattering convention
like a bull in a china shop, transferred to cinema with all the go-for-broke
daring of a maid doing dishes in a house kitchen. In Angels In America, Al Pacino's unscrupulous lawyer put it bluntly:
"Do you wanna be nice, or do you
wanna be effective?" Jay Roach
and Gary Ross have chosen the former, making movies that please most but fully
satisfy few, for one reason; they want to be approved of by studio execs, and
modestly enjoyed by as many ticket-taking patrons as possible. They want to be
liked by powerful people. That's why these movies never really achieve liftoff,
and that's why, after millions of dollars, countless man hours, and more
slogans than you'll see on the back of a pick-up truck in Waco, we're all so
damn unhappy with our 2012 presidential candidates.
I'm sure it seems a
stretch, but think about it; is a director compromising his artistry to please
an audience really all that different from a politician shifting his positions
to please the voters?
I'll say it again; they
want to be liked by powerful people.
I can't think of a better
example than Mitt Romney. Regardless of what you think of his political or
personal experiences, the fact of the matter is this; no human since Marilyn
Monroe has displayed such a constant, cloying, no-holds-barred need to be
adored by the right people. During the left-of-center Clinton years, those
people were Massachussetts progressives, to whom he said he'd be "more of
a friend to gays than Ted Kennedy". A decade and a half later, he's doing
his "marriage=man+woman" shtick at Liberty University, a school that
openly turns away LGBT students. Now, I've got no problem with a little bit of
well-reasoned flip-flopping, regardless of the candidate---listening to Newt
Gingrich for long periods of time gives me cramps of the soul, but I did
appreciate his nuanced shift on immigration reform. But from Mr. Gay BFF to Mr.
Federal Ban on Gay Marriage? It's like promising your kid a puppy, and then,
once it's grown up, shipping said puppy off to the Arctic. Of course, it's no
secret why he did it--the Religious
Right is now the biggest single subsection of the party, and he has to assure
them that he's exorcised his demonic social liberalism. But he needs fiscally
conservative, socially progressive centrists to love him too--thus the recent
video where he declares gay marriage to be a state issue, mere hours after he
called for a national amendment prohibiting it. I assumed Romney's post-primary
strategy would be to taper back to the center, but on this issue and countless
others, he's adhering to the bizarre strategy of taking nearly every position
at once, a feat of intellectual gymnastics that would give Cirque De Soleil pause. Like Ross and Roach, the guy can't settle on
a consistent narrative, preferring to please as many people as possible without
stating what would please him.
Beating up on Mitt Romney
isn't hard for a Commie Socialist Liberal Wacko Jewish Intellectual Type like
myself, but ragging on President Obama is the equivalent of a root
canal--agonizing, but necessary. First of all, I need to emphasize that this is
the man who, barring some Messianically revelatory Mitt-cident, I'm voting for
come November. He is a savvy master of the bureaucracy and a skilled player on
the world stage, with laudable foreign policy chops fit for an increasingly
global society. He is, most of all, a masterful Commander in Chief, overseeing
the end of a war and the death of Public Enemy Number One--two achievements the
guy deserves serious credit for, as I'll argue in a later post. But that's not
what he's running his campaign on. "This is a make or break moment for the
middle class", he stated at his recent rally, and that crucial moment
provides the crux of his campaign; forging a compassionately regulated free
market where those of moderate fiscal means and aims can do their thing.
Purportedly, that’s what the JOBS, or Jumpstart Our Business Startup Act, is
all about. (Jumpstart Our Businesses Startup? Who names these things, George Lucas?) The stated goal:
help start-up companies attract business by exempting them from reporting
certain expenses for their first five years. In fact, for five years, they need
not be audited or examined by a single independent accountant. So, as Rolling
Stone's Matt Taibbi cleverly puts it, an executive-investor conversation could
actually look something like this:
SILICON VALLEY
EXECUTIVE: Listen, IJustThoughtOfSomething.com is the hottest thing on the
internet. We're so huge it hurts... I can't even walk to my corner bodega
without women throwing me their phone numbers!
INVESTOR: I'd love to
invest. Can I see your numbers from last year?
SILICON VALLEY
EXECUTIVE: Well, that's just the thing. We painted the bathrooms last March,
and then we also had that Vitamin Water machine put in the lounge. You know,
the one next to the ping-pong table? So we just didn't have any money left over
for an accountant. But I estimate our revenues for 2014 to be $4.2 billion.
INVESTOR: Sounds hot!
Where do I send the check?
Yup. It's basically a
bill that lets big businesses hawk their projected (aka their ideal) future accomplishments without saying a single word
about their current ones. It'll help start-ups, yes, but mostly those willing
to lie, cheat, and steal to get to the top. It encourages fraud like Cheech and
Chong encouraged reaching for the Maui Wowie. It wasn’t Obama’s idea, but it
was A) Endorsed by Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a committee that Obama
started and shaped, and B) Lauded in a statement from Le Whitehouse. Oh, and
then El Presidente physically put pen to paper and signed it. He didn’t veto
it. He didn’t even try to stir up a healthy debate about it. He didn't even
have a committee take a look at the final product. He just passed it--signed,
sealed, delivered, Stevie Wonder style. In the midst of this "make-or
break moment for the middle class", this Act gets filed unquestionably
under "break"--and it was made law by the man who claims to be, more
than anything, all about "make". But hold on, Fox News. This isn't
the sort of mustache-twirling skullduggery you falsely accuse the President of
on an hourly basis. It's something a little more complex but almost as
infuriating; a cold, calculated political move. This grand deregulatory gesture
will, ideally, ease fears that he's trying to trying to impose stricter
policies on Wall Street--which is what he IS doing. Which is why I'm
checking his name on the damn ballot.
What gives?
Say it with me: He
wants to be liked by powerful people.
So far, it sure it seems like
I'm saying the most obvious thing in the whole world--the politicians we elect
are power-hungry and shifty, no matter their party or their position. But, it’s
worth pointing out that, more than ever before, it's true in this general
election. Indecision 2012 is, at its core, a battle between a man who obscures
his views on the Big Issues, and a man who states his strongly but enforces
them bashfully. They're both driven by the very force that hampered the
directors of the two moves I reviewed--an aversion to strong, bold action in
hopes of appealing to the broadest base possible. But--and it pains me to say
this--the fact that we've reached this sorry point is not entirely their
faults. Because, you see, while we can only watch the version of The Hunger
Games that they release in
theaters, we are not confined to a single presidential candidate--we get to
evaluate and pick from a pool of them, in a process that Wikipedia tells me is
called "voting". So, if it's a popular election gone wrong, the populace
must shoulder at least a little of the blame. In fact, I'd contend they should
shoulder a lot of it. Their voting choices are biting them in the ass for one
major reason; They want to be liked
by powerful people. This brings us to the sad, strange tale of Mr. Jon
Huntsman.
If the Republican Party had a
theme song this year, it’d undoubtedly be “Holding Out For A Hero”. There’s
always been tension within the GOP between small-government fiscal
conservatives and religiously motivated values voters, but come election time,
the two groups would always unite to elect someone who they agreed was better
than the liberal alternative. But in the past decade or so, the party opened
its gates to a handful of fringe movements—live-and-let-live-libertarians, hawkish
neocons, riled-up Tea Partiers—that won them votes but also fractured the
uneasy alliances within the party, with every group insisting it was the true
voice of American conservatism. More
than ever, the Republicans needed a candidate who could unite the disparate
factions of the party and draw in
independent voters, and it seemed that in this year of crash-and-burn Cains and
Perrys, no one fit the bill. Seemed is
the operative word here, because, in reality, the Republicans did have someone who could’ve energized the party and given
Obama a run for his money; Jon Huntsman, a two-time governor of Utah. Despite
his Mormon faith, his religiously motivated stance against abortion was almost
perfectly in line with that of Evangelical Christian voters. His experience as
an ambassador to China ought to have impressed neoconservatives worried about
our role on the world stage. His nuanced position on gay marriage (he’s against
it personally, but acknowledges that the Constitution guarantees them certain
rights) hews closely to libertarian ideals, and his anti-war stance and
interest in the environment, both unusual for a modern Republican candidate,
should’ve played like catnip to independents. So why did this guy flame out in
the first weeks of the campaign, deeply in debt and with only 3% of the vote?
The same reason a whip-smart, impressively experienced big-name politician lost
out to an optimistic underdog in 2008.
***
To reflect on Barack Obama’s 2008 run is to flip through a
mental slideshow of indelible, even historic moments; the candidacy
announcement in front of the Old State Capitol, the “More Perfect Union”
address, the “Yes We Can” chants and, of course, the iconic “Hope” poster. The
Clinton campaign’s contribution to pop-culture history? That “3 AM” ad. If
we’re telling a story of campaigns, than this is the tale of how an articulate,
spirited newcomer melded old-fashioned grassroots efforts with cutting-edge
technology to surge past a series of well-oiled establishment candidates and
trounce his opposition in the general election. To look at the candidates is to
see an entirely different story; the bizarre saga of an immensely qualified
front-runner quashed by an inexperienced upstart.
Hillary Rodham Clinton helped
litigate the Watergate case. During Bill Clinton’s eight years in office, she
was the most politically involved First Lady in our nation’s history, fighting
for children’s health care initiatives and even searching for a peaceful
solution to the Taliban problem. As a Senator, she spent six years visiting
war-torn Iraq, reforming the PATRIOT Act, and serving on the Committee on
Budget. Plus, let’s be honest—the woman’s battle-hardened. Between her
universal health care fight and the Lewinsky scandal, she’s learned the ins and
outs of our political institutions the hard way—and she’s learned how to play a
little hardball herself. By comparison, Obama’s pre-presidential experience
seems miniscule. He worked as a corporate lawyer, a community organizer, and a
voting registrar. He taught polisci classes at U of Chicago. He worked in the
Illinois State Senate, reforming local hospital laws. During his three years in
the US Senate (he started his presidential campaign before finishing his first
term), he worked to establish relationships with African governments, and to
counteract voter fraud. Important and praiseworthy accomplishments all, but presidential? Nahh. If elections were won and lost by resumes, Obama
would’ve been groveling at Hillary’s feet for a cabinet position. But resumes don’t win elections, and that may be the heart of this whole
epic election problem—we give in to the politics of spectacle. As a nation, our
thought process goes something like this:
“Invisible
Americans”….Hillary has a point. Her position on college loans is—THIS OBAMA
GUY IS SO KEWL!!! OMGSH HEZZZ TLKIN BOUT H0pE!!!
Hmmmmm…Huntsman really knows
his tax policy. I like the way he—LOOK!! ROMNEY’S SANGING AMURRIKA THE
BEUUTIFULL AND TAWKIN’ BOUT DA FLAG!!!!$
They always say that if you’re a
politican in this country, you’ve gotta learn how to pander. But, the media
being the doodyface that it is, it never poses the real question: What’s with
our ludicrous, juvenile need to be pandered to? Or, as Bill Maher puts it:
“Does any other country in the world need this much sunshine up its ass?!” Optimism and exceptionalism,
no matter how ungrounded, trump realism every time. Clinton’s man-of-the-people
peppiness beat Bush the Elder’s down-home decency. Bush the Younger’s
“compassionate conservatism” message pwnd Al Gore’s droll recitation of
inconvenient truths. And, though, in my opinion, Obama had better policy ideas
and a more appropriate temperament for the job than John McCain, he won not
because of those qualities, because his vague-but-resonant message of hope and
change resonated at the polls. We voted the guy in based on “Yes, we can!”, not
“How’s he gonna pull it off?” At the heart of it all is our collect insecurity,
our need to be (here we go again) liked by powerful people. And the less they
talking about liking us, the more likely we are to fire them. Imagine hiring a
CEOlike this. “Okay”, you’d think to yourself, “this guy’s worked his way up
the company for years, and really fits the bill. But that other guy had the best
handshake, and was SO nice….”
Say it with me. “Do you wanna be
nice, or do you wanna be effective?!”
Or, paraphrased for the current
political climate: “Do you want nice, or do you want effective?”
Do you want Jon Huntsman, who
told the American people to “get their act together” and suggested a complex
plan to do just that? Or would you prefer Mitt Romney, who speaks of “restoring
America” despite his prior involvement in the very kind of creative destruction
that caused this economic crisis?
If you had to choose between one
of the most successful centrists in the history of politics, or a man who,
according to columnist Drew Westen, “had a singularly unremarkable career as a
law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago
other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate,
he occasionally, as a state senator in Illinois, voted ‘present’ on difficult
issues”, who would you choose? The second one? Well, we did. And all because of
the politics of spectacle, of our need to turn our elections into reality
television shows instead of what the really ought to be; a smart, sensitive job
interview for the position of Most Important Leader In The World.
Until we figure that out, the wrong candidates will get
nominated and get into the White House. Or, almost as bad, the right candidate
will get voted in for the wrong reasons. Hell, if you buy my liberal-biased
pitch, that’s what’ll happen in 2012; Obama will win this year not because he’s
learned how to delegate important tasks, grown some cajones in his legislative
negotiations, fought for energy independence and finally taken some steps to
move us away from Bush’s nation-building policies. He’ll win because he better
fits our media-aided conception of a prez; an eloquent intellect who is, at
heart, just another one of us. Indeed, until we stop giving preference to that
image, until we start voting on qualifications instead of charisma, we’ll
continue to pay the price. Who knows what it’ll take to make this happen. On
Capitol Hill, a 1-term, six-year presidency would help, encouraging candidates
to enact their real plans without fear of losing re-election. On TV, the
folks with the microphones must stop giving undue attention to Romney’s dog or
Obama’s ex-girlfriend and focus on the issues. Believe me, I know a pipe dream
when I see one, and I know both those solutions are as likely as an Oscar for
Lindsay Lohan. Perhaps the most feasible option, then, is rethinking how we think about
politics. Perhaps history educators could focus a little less on the ready-made
legends of past presidents and encourage students to debate their policies.
Perhaps English classes could wade through a speech and learn not just about
the beauty of the rhetoric, but its dangerous power, its ability to simplify
and mislead. We should consider creating courses not just about civic history
but about intelligent citizenship, and make them mandatory for graduation or
(please don’t scream “socialism”!) for new voters. Or maybe one day, we’ll just
all wake up and shake off our addiction to spectacle like a cheap hangover, and
realize that the problem isn’t that low-key politicians can’t “mobilize us”.
It’s that it takes far, far too much effort for us to be mobilized. The
narrative of a democracy is, ideally, written by an informed electorate. But
the narrative’s gotten away from us, and we need to snatch it back—like Katniss
and Peeta do in The Hunger Games when they turn a handful of berries into an
object of protest, or like John McCain did, both in Game Change and real life, when
he grabbed the microphone back from a xenophobic audience member and did the
unthinkable—stood up for his rival.
I don’t know how we’re going to do this.
But I know we need to.
And I hope we can.
And as they say to the competitors of The Hunger Games—
May the odds be ever in our favor.
