Last night I was channel-hopping between the Republican convention and “The Candidate,” an old movie starring Robert Redford as a handsome young idealist (read liberal Democrat) running for a seat in the U.S. Senate against the incumbent, a much older, tradition-rooted (read conservative Republican) veteran politician. Redford starts off as a reluctant warrior, then gets the taste of the battle, then warms up to the standard political routine cooked up by his campaign manager, well played by Peter Boyle. He is shown at a series of whistle stops, spouting the same phrases – “We can no longer afford to pit black against white, young against old, poor against the less poor” – over and over, until he finds himself in the back seat of a cab, mumbling “poor against black,” “young against white,” “food against the foodless.” If winning requires inanity, then he will be inane, because he does not want to be a principled loser.
The hackneyed rhetoric could have come straight from Barak Obama’s speeches. But then, there was something eerily familiar about Sarah Palin’s lines, too. They were being mouthed in the film, not by Redford, but by Redford’s Republican opponent, Senator Jarmon, played by Don Porter. And Jarmon's audience in the movie, a sea of all-white, Rotary Club faces, looked just like the audience in St. Paul, patriotic to the core (with hints that the opposition would destroy all we hold dear). The Denver convention, on the other hand, was conspicuously multi-racial, just like the adoring audiences for Robert Redford. It was sometimes hard to tell which was the movie and which was the real convention. When Sarah Palin proudly proclaimed that “Senator McCain isn’t looking for a fight, but he’s not afraid of one, either,” the Republicans cheered wildly. Senator Jarmon delivered similar red meat, with comparable effect.
The movie and the conventions themselves have been reduced to cartoons. The virtuous young candidate, working tirelessly to save the planet from big, rapacious corporations, the heartless conservative, willing to see the poor starve in order to let the rich grow richer. The candidates try to play against type, but it is a losing battle. At least it was in the movie, for who in his right mind could vote against Robert Redford? Ah, but in 1972, the year of “The Candidate,” Richard Nixon, a cartoon conservative, defeated George McGovern, a cartoon liberal, in a landslide. You never know.
At the end of the movie, as the election returns confirm that Robert Redford has upset the incumbent senator, Redford turns to campaign manager Boyle and says, cluelessly, “What do we do now?” This November, I have a hunch that someone will say much the same thing. But I don’t know who.
