Plovergate

For the past few years a section of Goose Rocks Beach, where I live, has been roped off as a preserve for piping plovers, small birds whose population has dwindled down to numbers that have set off extinction alarms among preservationists. The ropes have been accompanied by stern signs warning people (and any of their pets that can read) to stay away from the birds. Thus we and the plovers have settled into an uneasy truce: You stay on your side of the ropes, we’ll stay on our side, and we’ll all get along.

This year the truce was broken. The birds’ advocates, seeing that the plover count continues to wane, declared war on animals they deemed predators. Raccoons, foxes, and skunks were among those targeted. We have to act quickly, said a fish and wildlife biologist, because “once a predation act occurs, it is too late.” The overseers of the nearby Rachel Carson Wildlife Preserve, having declared raccoons, foxes, and skunks an Axis of Predation, were stymied by their lack of weaponry, so they subcontracted the job to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and soon a USDA truck was seen roaming Goose Rocks, loaded with traps. “What happens to the animals you trap?” asked one local. The USDA hired gun answered that they “euthanize” them. He also acknowledged that they sometimes shoot them.

The story was front-page news in the local paper, and Plovergate was born. Many Goose Rocks residents were outraged that their tax dollars were being used to kill animals whose only sin was trying to feed their young. I was one of the outraged. A few weeks ago a family of foxes took up residence in sand dunes near my house. Papa fox, mama fox, and three tiny kits. Foxes lived in the same foxhole last year, and my children and grandchildren loved to watch them. (The photo above was taken by one of my daughters.) We looked forward to having the new family as neighbors this year. But then, one night a week or two ago, a volley of shots rang out, and the foxes haven’t been seen since.

The piping plover, as even its supporters admit, is not a genius among birds, and it is easy prey for all manner of predators that roam this area. In time the bird will probably become extinct, a prospect that appalls the fish and wildlife folks. But species do become extinct, because that is the way things are in nature. If the fish and wildlife crowd wants to prolong the plovers’ existence, then they should build a plover preserve (Ploverville?) somewhere far away from humans, their pets, and all the other animals that somehow get along without Government assistance.

A Tale of Two Pension Funds

New York State’s pension fund manages $122 billion, which, in the world’s center of creative financing, offers lots of opportunities for wheeling and dealing. According to the New York Times, this pension fund, controlled not by a board or a committee but by a single individual, awarded some of that pension money to an investment firm known as Quadrangle Group, which then arranged to help finance a low-budget movie called “Chooch.”

The trail is just now starting to unwind, and various threads of the story involve the State Comptroller, a former comptroller, the Chairman of the State’s Liberal Party, and the man who now heads the President’s automobile industry task force. Most of these people have not been charged with anything more than bad judgment, but the point is: How in the world did even a dollar of the New York State pension money wind up financing a movie named “Chooch”?


Now let’s cross the pond to the Netherlands. There we find a huge pension fund called ABP making another investment in the entertainment business. For an undisclosed price (rumored to be less than $200 million), the Dutch pensioners acquired the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, which gives them licensing rights to Oklahoma, South Pacific, Carousel, The Sound of Music, The King and I, and the rest of the R&H canon. But that’s not all. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization also controls the rights to 100 musicals, including those written by Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and Jerome Kern, 500 concert works, and 12,000 songs. So, with a stroke of the pen and the writing of a check that seems very modest, the Dutch pension fund has walked off with much of the American songbook, arguably one of this country’s most valuable artistic treasures. They also acquired the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization itself, one of the world’s leading entertainment powerhouses. Give them credit; the Netherlands pension fund was very canny indeed, and, since the music they own is as close to immortal as you can get, its clients will reap the benefits of that investment long after we are all dead and gone.

And New York, the place where all that music was born? Its pensioners got a movie called “Chooch.”

Allegro - The New Recording

…..But enough about politics. Let’s turn our attention to weightier matters, like the thrilling new recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ALLEGRO. This musical, following on the heels of OKLAHOMA and CAROUSEL, was so eagerly awaited (it had the largest advance sale in history) it just had to disappoint. And disappoint it did, for reasons that people still argue about today. In my opinion it was by far the best of the R&H flops and the one most deserving of another chance. If you would like to learn more about my thoughts on the original ALLEGRO (which I saw, incidentally, back in 1947), you’ll find it in a blog posting dated April 28, 2006.

But today I would like to rave about the new, “first complete recording” of ALLEGRO. It is wonderful, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Ted Chapin of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, R&H Music Director Bruce Pohamac, conductor Larry Blank, David Lai of Sony, and a few other colleagues. And a dream cast, including Audra McDonald, Laura Benanti, Nathan Gunn, and Liz Callaway. And a talented group of musicians in Bratislava.

Bratislava? Well, yes, because a Slovakian orchestra was looking for work, schooled in the romantic tradition, and available. So off Chapin and buddies went to Bratislava, where they gave the orchestra the magnificent Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations, rehearsed, and recorded – just the orchestra. Then, the audio tracks safely stowed, they flew back to the U.S., recorded the chorus, then the soloists, then a final recording session to add some neat touches, like the voice of Oscar Hammerstein. When you hear the final product, you will think all 70 cast members and the Istropolis Philharmonic Orchestra were gathered together in a huge recording hall, but you will be wrong, because we are living in the age where little children have learned to ask “Is it real, daddy?”

But all the audio razzle-dazzle would have been wasted without sure-fire casting and without one of Rodgers’s most melodic scores to work with. Whatever the faults of ALLEGRO, the score is not among them. If you are old enough, you may remember A Fellow Needs a Girl or So Far. If you are also tuned in to show music, you may even recall You Are Never Away or The Gentleman is a Dope. But my own favorites are I Know It Can Happen Again, Winters Go By, Wish Them Well, and Come Home, Joe, sung by Audra McDonald. Hearing Audra wrap her glorious voice around that one song is worth the cost of the entire two-disc set.

The play tells the story of Joseph Taylor, Jr., son of a country doctor and destined to become a doctor himself. It begins with Junior’s birth, follows him through school, medical school, romance, marriage, and his fateful encounter with the decision of his life: whether to climb the medical escalator in the big Chicago hospital or return to join his dad in his home town. This being a Hammerstein book, you’d expect Joe to chuck the high life in favor of the honest labors of the country doctor, and you’d be right. But, in a most un-Hammersteinly twist, the girl he married, his childhood sweetheart, turns out to be seduced by the glitter (and by a wealthy hospital benefactor), and Joe goes home without her – but with nurse Emily, who, it is assumed, will marry him once the legalities are sorted out.

In the original, Emily was played by Lisa Kirk, and a highlight was her The Gentleman is a Dope. Lisa came off as a sadder but wiser nurse, who knows the score, even though the gentleman doesn’t. In the new recording, Emily is sung by Liz Callaway, a much sweeter proposition with a less torchy reading of the lyric. The casting apparently surprised a few people, but the producers asked themselves who would be more likely to leave the big city and follow her fellow back to the sticks – Elaine Stritch or Julie Andrews?

There is a lot of music on these two discs, and it is not, I must say, all gold. A few songs – Yatata Yatata, Money Isn’t Everything, and the title song – are clunkers, because their irony places them more in Sondheimland than in the world of R&H. In fact, it is worth noting that Stephen Sondheim was a gofer for the original ALLEGRO, just as Ted Chapin was a gofer, much later, for Sondheim’s FOLLIES.

These few shortcomings aside, the new recording of ALLEGRO deserves a place in the collection of anyone who loves Broadway music and musicals. I also have the original cast recording of the show, but I doubt that I’ll listen to it any more; the new one seems destined to be, for the foreseeable future, the definitive recording of this fine, underrated musical.

Is There a Statesman in the House?

A lot of people are very angry about the bonuses paid to AIG employees, as they should be. But should that fact serve as a signal for members of Congress to form a lynch mob? Should we expect better of our representatives, or must we accept the fact that a politician will never pass up the chance to play the demagogue, especially when the TV cameras are present?

The most shameful exhibitionist of them all was Senator Grassley of Iowa, who said that the AIG people should contemplate suicide, Japanese style. In interviews later, he passed that off as "rhetoric." I pass it off as despicable.

Today a Massachusetts congressman had his turn to vent. Badgering the AIG CEO (who just came on the scene, had no culpability whatsoever, and works for a dollar a year), the Congressman lashed out at the hapless executive, and when the victim said he "took offense" at the Congressman's remarks, the Bay State politician shouted that the offense was intended. That exchange, the Congressman no doubt figured, was worth at least 1000 votes in the next election.

As bad as George Bush's poll numbers were, Congress's were worse, deservedly. Yes, there are venal businesspeople, but there are venal Congressmen, too. The difference is that the businesspeople never get the chance to call Congressional crooks crooks, at least not while the cameras are running.

Then there is the matter of a new tax, narrowly configured to snare only the high-income employees of firms accepting TARP money over a certain, Congressionally mandated, threshold. No matter how much we dislike the much publicized AIG bonuses, it is monstrous for Congress to retaliate in this way. Once we cede Congress the power to impose confiscatory tax rates on any group of people the public hates, we are not much better than the good Massachusetts folks in 17th century Salem.

All this Congressional foaming at the mouth gives President Obama a wonderful opportunity to rise above it and act the statesman, vetoing the most outrageously vindictive bills. Just as Candidate Obama made a wonderful, historic speech about race during the campaign, President Obama now has the chance to remind everyone that class warfare is just as insidious and just as destructive as race warfare. Do we have a statesman or a politician in the White House? We will see.

The Rhetoric Trap

The problem is our rhetoric. Our politicians constantly tell us that our workers are the smartest, most innovative, most creative, and hardest-working in the world. It follows, then, that we deserve the most comfortable lifestyle, ensured by entitlement programs that have expanded beyond reason (and beyond our ability to pay for them). We are told by advertisers that every American deserves the good life ("You deserve the very best” or "You owe it yourself..."). American exceptionalism has been proclaimed for so long and so emphatically that we have come to believe it. If other countries are starting to creep up on us economically, it must be because they cheat, manipulating their currencies, subsidizing their industries, and free-loading off our world-wide defense forces.

There’s an ounce of truth in all this. The American brand of free-market capitalism has proved itself superior to centralized planning, and for the past century we have achieved amazing things. But the jingoism is wearing thin these days. After all, we can’t very well bash China while we’re borrowing more a billion dollars a day from them, can we? If we’re so much smarter than they are, shouldn’t they be borrowing from us?

The rhetoric trap brings me to President Obama and his national budget. I don’t quite know what to make of it or of the bellicose rhetoric that accompanied its unveiling. If the President really believes that we can mend our broken economy by redistributing wealth, that’s one thing. But if his budget is based not on pragmatism but on political theater, that’s another.

It is easy to characterize the big Wall Street bonuses and the private jets and the parties at Las Vegas as excesses. And it’s not fair, as Warren Buffett says, for a top executive to be taxed at the same rate as his secretary. But then, Lenin and others have attacked capitalism on fairness grounds, too. Capitalism is arguably unfair. Life is unfair. You can’t win a logic contest judged on fairness. So if you hold the reins of power, you try to find a system that works for most people, and screw the fairness or unfairness.

My faith in Barack Obama has been based on my belief that he is, ultimately, a pragmatist. Indeed he has said as much, repeatedly using the term “what works” as a mantra. But now I fear that he is giving in to other principles. The “buy America” provision in pending legislation is suspect under “what works” thinking, as any Wal-Mart shopper can tell you.

The promise to arrange the tax code so that “the affluent” are defined as those making more than $250,000 is equally spurious. In a different era, I remember House Speaker Tip O’Neill being asked where he drew the dividing line between haves and have-nots. “$50,000 a year,” he answered. Later, the Alternative Minimum Tax was packaged and sold as a means of catching the idle rich. Alas, neither Tip O’Neill’s dividing line nor the AMT was indexed for inflation, and President Obama has not mentioned a word about indexing his proposed tax plan. Given the outlook for the dollar, it is quite possible that most members of the middle class will soon be earning $250,000 a year – and be taxed accordingly. That’s how governments from time immemorial have solved their financial problems.

John McCain and Barack Obama, in the presidential campaign, both championed “straight talk,” while both were giving us, not straight talk, but political talk. No wonder folks are so cynical. And I am afraid President Obama has not lost the appetite for political talk. He is acting and talking as if his victory was a mandate for a lurch to the left, when in fact it was simply a repudiation of George Bush and the Republicans. There’s a difference.

So let’s please have an end to the political talk, Mister President, and the beginning of some real straight talk. Something like this:

My fellow Americans. Globalism is neither bad nor good, but it is a fact, and we must accept that. Americans are good workers, but so are the Chinese and the Indians and the Japanese and the Brazilians. We are smart, but so are they. We can’t build fences around the United States, and we can no longer dictate how other people live. Once we start believing that we are entitled to more just because we are Americans, we are in for a hard time, because the other 95 percent of the world’s population won’t accept that.

And we cannot succeed by attacking each other. Just as we have fought battles against discrimination on the basis of race and creed, we must be careful not to hate people because they have more money or a bigger house or a newer car. Any economic system produces winners, and our job is to see that we have more winners, not fewer. The more winners we have, the fewer losers there will be.

I wish I could promise you all a satisfying career and a comfortable retirement, based simply on the fact that you were born in this country. I can’t. No President can, although many have tried. In the final analysis, you must rely on your own skills and enterprise and work ethic, fortified by the love and compassion of your family and friends. Your country can create a helpful environment, but you must do the heavy lifting.

Thoughts on Stimulating the Economy

Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson



Abraham Lincoln serves as an inspiration for our new president, as he does for millions of people who credit him with saving the Republic and freeing the slaves. Lincoln was indeed a great man, who left enough of a paper trail to document his greatness. But our founding fathers – Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton – were arguably even greater, for it was they who created a republic worth saving.

Rick Santelli, a CNBC regular at the Chicago trading pit, takes a straw poll on the justice of bailing out people who added a new bathroom in a house they couldn’t afford in the first place. In the pit, the response is unanimously negative. The chorus of raspberries reflects a growing sentiment among people who play by the rules that they should not be forced to rescue those who knowingly took on more debt than their income could handle.

Those who think it is right to bail out borrowers who are over their heads say that the borrowers were victimized by villainous banks, that they didn’t fully understand adjustable-rate mortgages, that they were simply chasing the American dream, home ownership.

They have a point. Many if not most mortgagees didn’t understand the terms they agree to. Their parents never told them, as mine did, that you shouldn’t pay more than a week's wages for a month's rent. More’s the pity, they never learned that in school, either, because you never learn even rudimentary economics in school.

We are a nation of economic illiterates. What’s worse, most of our Congressional representatives, judging by their televised comments during recent hearings, don’t know a thing about derivatives, CDOs, LIBOR, option spreads, ETFs, etc. So, instead of asking intelligent questions of the witnesses, they rail against private jets, golden parachutes, and bonuses. There’s nothing like righteous indignation to show the folks back home how tough you are on the fat cats.

If you’ve been reading these blogs for a while, you know that I have been a stock-market bear for the last two years. Alas, today I am just as bearish as ever. There is no bottom in sight, despite the cheer-leading from the CNBC die-hards. Their arguments are all based on history: Recessions and bear markets last x months on average, the stock market always turns up six months before the economy turns, if you wait until you see the economy pick up you’ll miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime, blah, blah, blah.

Much as I appreciate history, in this case it is of no value. In previous recessions we were not in hock to China. In previous recessions we were not being impoverished by runaway entitlements. In previous recessions we had a world-class manufacturing base. In previous recessions we weren’t fighting an expensive war that had no end in sight.

President Obama, who deserves more support than he is getting these days, will soon start getting blamed, unjustly, for the spreading misery. He began his presidency with the nation in a sharp red-blue divide, and whatever he does to address the economic collapse is sure to enrage either the reds or the blues. Enraging the left is probably a safer course, because he has a deep reservoir of support there, but that would go against his instincts.

What should he do? Despite the popular shibboleth that “Main Street is more important than Wall Street,” the stock market is our best barometer of the national confidence in the economy. Consumer confidence has been destroyed, and as the consumer goes, so goes 70 percent of our economy. And the consumer is now seeing his or her 401-K and the dream of a comfortable retirement go down the drain with the stock market.
Like it or not, Main Street cannot recover unless Wall Street recovers.

Here’s an idea: Declare a moratorium on capital-gains taxes. Maybe a year, maybe two. There aren’t any gains anyway, so it won’t cost the Treasury much unless the stock market takes off. And if it does take off, it will be because risk capital has begun flowing again, and the risks have started paying off. As it is, the risk capital is all in Treasury bonds and mattresses, and that doesn’t help.

Cutting the capital-gains tax rate to zero, even for one year, would be controversial, but it would in keeping with Obama’s stated appetite for thinking outside the box. As for Congress, he could charm the Democrats, and the Republicans wouldn’t dare complain.

While the stock market would be a primary target of such a move, the elimination of capital-gains taxes might also invigorate the real estate market.

There’s a risk that the moratorium would ignite the stock market for a short-term rally with no economic follow-through. But I think the risk-taking current runs deep in this country, and that, once the flow is restarted, the economy would heal itself.

It won’t happen. For this president, eliminating the capital gains tax would be, not just outside the box, but outside the galaxy. Thus the economy and the stock market will continue south. I remain a bear.

The Obama Presidency - Chapter Two

Dice are rolling, the knives are out
Would be presidents are all around
I don’t say they mean harm, but they’d each give an arm
To see us six feet under ground.
- from “Evita” lyric by Tim Rice

So it must seem to President Obama this week. The nightly television talk, especially that carried by cable, is filled with carping. The editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are given over to Karl Rove, John Bolton, and the neocons in exile, tell us daily how badly the new President is screwing up on foreign policy, on the financial rescue programs, and on just about everything on his plate. And the man has been in office barely a month! It doesn’t seem fair.

All right, some criticism is justified, especially on errant cabinet appointments. But that’s not the loudest beef. What really ticks off the hard right is his promise to talk with Iran, his determination to close Gitmo, and his obvious preference for diplomacy over confrontation. Real men choose confrontation, the hawks seem to be saying. Pie-in-the-sky Obama just doesn’t get it.

The most dangerous situation facing us is what’s brewing in Pakistan. As someone said, Afghanistan is irrelevant; the real game is in Pakistan, a big country, a poor country, and a country filled with weapons, including the nuclear kind. As is so often the case these days, we get along (barely) with the leaders but the people don’t like us. What should the President do about Pakistan? The neocons would say “get tough.” The doves would say, “pull out.” Neither approach makes sense. It’s not that simple. The problem calls for patient, thoughtful diplomacy. Above all, it calls for working the global room, schmoozing with China, Russia, and other Asian neighbors. Obama seems to recognize this, and the critics should at least give him credit for his recent overtures to Russia, whose help would be invaluable in Asia. But they won’t, because some of them are still fighting the cold war.

The polls suggest that the natterers are having little effect on public opinion, as Obama’s honeymoon continues. Of course, the kind of decisions he will have to make soon, especially on the financial front, are sure to cost a lot of people a lot of money, and that will take points off his approval rating. Will the public blame the President, or will it blame the forces that created the problem? Reason says the latter, but I am not so sure. A wild card in all this is Congress, which seems intent on pulling Obama to the left, a chancy move in a country that is still somewhat to the right of center politically.

This week the President took the gloves off, so to speak, in addressing the Republican opposition to his financial bailout, reminding them pointedly that it was the Democrats, after all, who won the election. Fine; there is nothing wrong with showing a little spine in politics. But one hopes he will be equally tough on the Congressional Democrats who try to yank him off the reservation, because it seems to me that they will turn out to be his real problem in Washington. The Republicans, for all their bluster, are, like Afghanistan, irrelevant. If you want to know where the dice are rolling and the knives are out, look in the direction of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Einstein's Dreams

Have you ever wondered about the nature of time? Of course you have. I have. We all have, including Einstein, who wondered about time a great deal and finally came to grips with it in 1905, when he published four remarkable treatises, including one setting out his theory of relativity.

The possibility of time travel has excited fiction-writers for many years, and even though I have seen The Time Machine often, I never tire of watching Weena and her simple-minded Eloi friends escape the Morlocks. Countless other time-travel tales engage us, even though we know the basic premise is impossible.

Or is it?

Last night I read a little book called Einstein’s Dreams. It was written in 1993 by an MIT professor named Alan Lightman, and it is one of those books you can’t put down. The subject matter is the hook, but the fact that Lightman is a world-class writer is the grabber.

The book, which runs a mere 179 pages, explores the possibilities attached to various theories about the nature of time, some well known, some not so. Maybe time is a repetitive phenomenon. Maybe time does not exist outside our perception. Maybe, since time is related to mass, it passes more slowly the farther you are from the earth’s core. Maybe there are two kinds of time: mechanical time and body time. Maybe, because time passes more slowly for people in motion, those who travel at high speed gain time.

The book is organized as a series of vignettes, dated throughout 1905 and separated by “interludes” in which Einstein chats with his friend Besso in Berne. But Einstein’s fantasies of various time-altered “worlds” are the attraction here, along with the metaphysical points they make. Take this picture of a world in which everyone travels at high velocity to gain time:

"A man or a woman suddenly thrust into this world would have to dodge houses and buildings. For all is in motion. Houses and apartments, mounted on wheels, go careening through Bahnhofplatz and race through the narrows of Marktgasse, their occupants shouting from second-floor windows. The post office doesn’t remain on Postgasse, but flies through the city on rails, like a train. ….Everywhere the air whines and roars with the sound of motors and locomotion. When a person comes out of his front door at sunrise, he hits the ground running, catches up with his office building, hurries up and down flights of stairs, works at a desk propelled in circles, gallops home at the end of the day…..No one is still.”

The book was widely praised when it was first published, but it took me a while to discover the small volume, which has been sitting in my library, unnoticed, for at least 10 years. What made me decide to pick it up last night? Why did Einstein have his “annus mirabilis” the same year my mother was born, the year her father died? Why did I choose to quote the paragraph above, only noting afterward that it was dated May 29, my birthday?

Tonight, still in my own private time warp, I read the short story “Germelshausen,” by Friedrich Gerstäcker, which takes place in a small German village that comes to life for one day every hundred years. I remember reading it in German when I was in high school, but then I knew it as “Das Geheimnisvollen Dorf” (the full-of-mystery village). It’s a lovely tale, used as the basis for Brigadoon. And further proof that, no matter how surely we are prisoners of mechanical time, the idea of breaking free of those chains is endlessly fascinating.

Brideshead Regurgitated

In 1947 MGM invited Evelyn Waugh to Hollywood to discuss the sale of the film rights to Brideshead Revisited. Soon after talks began, it was clear to Waugh that MGM wanted, not his masterpiece, but a Hollywood version of the story. So the talks broke down. But Waugh made the most of his trip, visiting Forest Lawn Cemetery, which inspired him to write the satirical The Loved One. This one was sold to MGM, many years later, with sorry results. Waugh hated it and probably felt relieved that he had at least kept Brideshead out of MGM’s clutches. Coincidentally, Waugh died shortly after The Loved One was released.

(Actually, Waugh didn’t sell the film rights to The Loved One to Hollywood. His agent sold them to a Mexican on the assurance that it would never be produced but would allow Waugh and Alec Guinness to enjoy a Mexican holiday together. The Mexican later sold the rights to Hollywood, infuriating Waugh.)

As a matter of fact, Waugh’s stylish prose does not translate well to film, the towering exception being the 1981 television production of Brideshead Revisited, about which more later. Sword of Honor, based on Waugh’s wartime trilogy, was made into a passable TV film, and A Handful of Dust was more than passable, but Scoop, Vile Bodies (Bright Young Things), and The Loved One were dreadful. Once the screenwriter decides to “improve” or “modernize” Waugh, the die is cast: After you remove Waugh’s brilliant prose, there is nothing left, because Evelyn Waugh wrote novels, not film treatments. (Graham Greene, on the other hand, wrote with the camera in mind, which is why The Third Man, The Heart of the Matter, Our Man in Havana, and other Greene titles were as successful as movies as they were as books.)

Writer John Mortimer, who wrote the screenplay for the widely and justly praised Brideshead Revisited miniseries (and who died only a few weeks ago) was rigorously faithful to Waugh’s novel, and this fact, plus a solid gold cast, made that production what is, in the minds of many (including me), the best piece of dramatic fiction ever put on film. Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom were Lord and Lady Marchmain, Jeremy Irons (in his breakthrough role) was Charles Ryder, John Gielgud played his father, and Anthony Andrews was Sebastian Flyte. The supporting actors, notably Simon Jones as Brideshead and Phoebe Nicholls as Cordelia Flyte, were all excellent. But the lion’s share of the credit is due John Mortimer for capturing not only the language but the spirit of the novel.

That brings me to the 2008 movie version of Brideshead Revisited. I was not expecting a production to rival the 1981 TV classic; that would be asking too much. But the lead screenwriter was Andrew Davies, well known and respected for his many Masterpiece Theater scripts, so I was not expecting a total disaster either. But that is what I got. If I had viewed the “Making Of” featurette in the bonus material, I would have been warned. “We wanted to do a contemporary reading of the novel,” said someone. Oh-oh. Translation: The producers said to the writers, “Look, Waugh leaves the relationship between Charles and Sebastian ambiguous. Let’s make them conspicuously gay, maybe have them kiss. And Waugh’s Lady Marchmain is a sympathetic if over-zealous matriarch. Bo-ring. Let’s make her a sort of a Catholic dragon lady, with a hint of Lady Macbeth."

The movie is constrained by its length (a little over two hours), so Anthony Blanche, Cordelia, Samgrass, and Boy Mulcaster are reduced to walk-ons. That’s forgivable, but not the jettisoning of the spiritual story at the heart of the novel.

For the miniseries, Mortimer was wise enough to have Charles Ryder deliver voice-overs, with the distinctive voice of Jeremy Irons intoning the elegant sentences of Waugh. Thus, when Ryder, a wartime soldier, returns to the majestic Brideshead mansion he recalls:

“I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the beauty of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.”

Matthew Goode, who plays Charles in the new film, looks and sounds a bit like Irons, and several other members of the cast look eerily like their earlier counterparts, with similar hairdos and costumes. And Castle Howard in Yorkshire, which became a tourist magnet a quarter century ago after it gained word-wide fame as Brideshead, is again pressed into service for the film. But these surface similarities only remind viewers who have seen the miniseries what a gulf in quality separates the two versions.

The real losers are those whose first exposure to Brideshead Revisited is the 2008 film – those who have never read the novel or seen the 1981 television production. They are to be pitied, for they will have seen a movie that is pretty lame, and they will wonder, “Why has so much been made of this very ordinary story about very unhappy people?”

In fact, the new film is probably the very film that MGM moguls wanted to make when they welcomed Evelyn Waugh to Hollywood in 1947. They might have cast Cary Grant as Charles, Jimmy Stewart as Sebastian, and Vivien Leigh as Julia. The 1947 movie would have been chaste, of course, but it would have been as soul-less as the newest version. Waugh saw it coming and fled. Too bad his estate didn’t have his good taste.

Oh, well. At least it hasn’t been made into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

The Obama Presidency - Chapter One

We are scarcely one week into the Obama presidency, and the carping has begun, from both the right and the left. From the right, the beef is that he is socializing the country. The left is sore that he is not moving faster to socialize the country. With a sky-high approval rating, the President can afford to ignore the snipers on the fringes, but it is harder to ignore the extremists in Congress.

Meanwhile, “W” has gone back to the ranch, to the accompaniment of a stirring “Ave Atque Vale” from Karl Rove, who says that Bush’s unforgivable sin, in the eyes of his detractors, is that he won in Iraq. I must have missed that news bulletin. The fact is that the country is worse off, by a mile, than it was eight years ago, and, though not all of the problems were of his making, too many were. To those who quibble about the WMD deception, the hawks shift gears, insisting that “the world is a safer place with Saddam Hussein gone.” But the world, in the eyes of many, is a safer place with Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle et al gone. As for Bush 43, he will lie low for a while, remembered by the public much as Bill Buckner was remembered in Boston.

Obama’s problem is not the sniping, but the economy. The country will have to deleverage big time, and the process will take years and be painful. Although deflation is the immediate threat, eventually Government will react the way Governments always react to economic collapses: They debase the currency. China, holding a ton of our IOUs, watches anxiously, and one wonders what on earth possessed Timothy Geithner to yank China’s chain by accusing it of currency manipulation. One expects Senator Schumer to bash the Chinese, as demagogues are wont to do, but the incoming Treasury Secretary?

Of course, when you publicly insist that the yuan is too cheap and should appreciate, what you are really saying is that the dollar is too high and should depreciate. But you can’t say that, so instead, if you are the Secretary of the Treasury, you keep blathering that a strong dollar is in the national interest.

President Obama is a smart man who no doubt is going down the presidential learning curve very fast. Here is what I suspect he has already learned:

Much as the public is fed up with bank bail-outs, there is no way to avoid more of them. Like it or not, the banking system is the ship carrying the economy, and if the ship sinks, we all sink.

China and the U.S. are now joined at the hip. Their economy needs our markets, and our economy needs their financial support. But we need them more than they need us, because their people can endure hardship better than we can. Put another way, the last thing Obama needs on his plate is a flare-up in U.S. – China tensions. (BO to TG: Cool it.)

Much of the Arab world is aghast at what Israel has done to Gaza, but that was to be expected. The reaction in Europe is another matter. The fact is that Israel has only one real supporter of substance in the world: us. None of the other major players on the world scene – not China, nor Japan, nor Europe, nor India – is interested in cosponsoring Israel. So in the community of nations, not only is Israel isolated, but on this matter we are, too. Even more dangerous, Israel may believe that it can count on our support if it strikes Iran preemptively. The chances of such a strike will increase after February 10, when the hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu will likely become Israel’s Prime Minister. “Peace is purchased from strength,” writes Netanyahu in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, overlooking the fact that Israel has enjoyed overwhelming military superiority for decades, with no peace to show for it.

Obama has already made it abundantly clear that, whatever the truculent instincts of other countries and tribes, his preference is to cool off the hot spots with diplomacy. That is a hopeful sign. Besides, what’s the alternative? Shock and awe?

Our new President also faces tough choices in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and even neighboring Mexico, where drug wars infest the streets of Tijuana and Juarez. England’s economy is crumbling, and continental Europe is rethinking the wisdom of a common currency. In fact, few parts of the world do not have major problems. Why would anyone in his right mind want to be President at a time like this?

It’s the audacity of hope. The whole world is looking to the U.S. cavalry to ride to the rescue. Foreigners don’t like to admit it, but they really believe we are their only hope. That is why billions watched the inauguration on TV so hopefully. They saw more than 2 million Americans on the mall in Washington, being civil, no, friendly to each other. The week before, they saw more than 100 people standing on the wings of a half-submerged airplane in the Hudson River, as calmly as if they were waiting for a taxi at Grand Central. No pushing and shoving, no climbing over each other to get a seat on the ferry. Only in America, the world thought.

And the world was right.

Inauguration

It is time, the always readable Peggy Noonan writes, to suspend disbelief. Barack Obama is really happening. What’s more, this unbelievable event gives us all a chance, a sliver of a chance, to reshape our country, to put aside the rancor, the meanness that has infected our dialogue for too long. Yes, coming together is the bromide of every political campaign, but Barack Obama really believes it. He is the most sincere, most genuine, most persuasive president-elect I have ever seen. He is either the real McCoy or the greatest con artist this country has ever seen. I vote for McCoy, because it is also time to suspend cynicism.

It is also time to pray. The country is in great trouble. It doesn’t look that way at first glance. Bread lines or soup kitchens are hardly a common sight, as they were in the Great Depression. But Wall Street has seen a few suicides, and millions of people are out of work. Mortgage foreclosures are epidemic, and other shoes (commercial real estate, credit cards, car loans) have yet to fall. The patient’s condition is serious, and we need a seriously capable leader, and I think we may have one starting Tuesday.

Much is made of Franklin Roosevelt’s heroics in the 1930s, and he does deserve full credit for making people think they were better off while the unemployment rate kept climbing. My parents, life-long Democrats, believed in FDR and bought into the New Deal and the WPA and all the rest. Today it’s easy to be cynical about Roosevelt, but consider this: Let’s say that nothing he could have done would have pulled us out of the Depression in the 30s (my view, as it happens). Now, would the public have been any happier without all those fireside chats and soaring speeches? Or would revolution have been in the air? There is much to be said for an inspirational leader. If the leader is also wise (like, say, Washington or Lincoln or Churchill), so much the better.

There is also much to be said for a leader who is unflappable in a crisis. We need a president who will deal with a global financial meltdown the way Captain Sullenberger dealt with losing both engines of his A320 – calmly, professionally. Barack Obama is one cool cat, as they used to say ages ago, and it is impossible to imagine him losing his composure when it is most needed.

I am also naturally drawn to Obama because he is a man of words, a gifted writer and orator. When was the last time we had a president who treated the language with respect, who delivered sentences and phrases and whole paragraphs as if they were music? Yes, he has a speechwriter, but Obama will be the master of the Oval Office rhetoric, and he will craft the structure and vocabulary and cadence of what he delivers.

So, Peggy, I will gladly suspend disbelief Tuesday. More than that, I will watch the pageantry with a sense of awe and a prayer that, no matter how high the expectations surrounding Barack Obama, he will exceed them.

Ding-Ding

Sitting on my night table is a remote digital thermometer, which receives signals from an outside sensor and converts them into temperature readings so that each morning when I wake up I can see what I am store for (this time of year in Maine, the news is usually bad). As far as I can tell, it is accurate, and the digits are big enough so that I don’t need my glasses, so I am generally a happy customer. But the thermometer also includes an alarm function, so that every day at noon it chimes for two minutes. Or, to quote my wife, “it goes ding-ding. Fred, it is going ding-ding. Why is it going ding-ding?”

I have read every word of the instruction sheet, and I have concluded that there is no way to turn off the ding-ding. It is a software bug. Either that or Taylor Instrument has forgotten to tell users how to shut the damn thing up.

If this were an isolated instance of digital mischief, I could understand. But I am afraid it is worse than that. All the digital devices in the house have mounted a mutiny, which has grown worse since the protracted power outage caused by an ice storm a few weeks ago. The microwave oven goes berserk almost every day. One minute it works fine, the next minute it quits, and no amount of poking the controls will produce any response. Then, an hour or two later, it comes back to life. Unplugging it, as the manual suggests, doesn’t cure the problem. Nor does the addition of a surge protector. It works when it jolly well feels like working.

A digital picture frame also has a mind of its own, firing up at odd times without human intervention. A possible explanation, according to the manufacturer’s on-line service technician, is that it speaks PC, and I speak Mac when I load pictures from iPhoto. Then there is my wife’s computer-controlled sewing machine, which, after years of faithful service, decided that buttonholing was something it just didn’t want to do any more.

My wife talked darkly of mischievous “little men” inside these digital devices. I used to laugh at this; now I am not so sure.

Next month, we are all forewarned, analog television signals will go the way of 45-rpm records, and a new day of digital bliss will dawn. Digital signals, the FCC and the consumer electronics industry tell us, will give us better picture quality and open up lots of ancillary services. (Most of all, they don’t tell us, they will resuscitate sagging sales at Best Buy and Radio Shack.)

The other day I played an old tape cassette on a good tape deck into a very good analog amplifier, which fed a pair of very good old speakers. It was a tape of Melissa Manchester singing old classics, starting with “Over The Rainbow.” And I heard sound I have never heard from my CD collection or my iHome player or any of the digital wonders that bedeck my entertainment center. The timber, the bass, the color were beyond anything the digital equipment could emulate. It was beautiful.

I will go along with the digital revolution, because I have to. Analog computers lost the battle a long time ago, and if we want all the benefits of the computer age we must be willing to put up with the occasional mutiny and the ding-dings. But I will keep my old analog gear, my old tape cassettes, and my old original cast albums on LP records, so that every so often I can listen to full-bodied music and not just digital slices.

Wanted: 10,000 Entrepreneurs

Barack Obama, who will become our President next week, puts his economic philosophy this way: “It depends on whether you want to reward wealth or reward the workers who create wealth.” That’s a standard Democratic mantra, for which he can be forgiven. But there is another subset of the population that is overlooked in both the Democratic and Republican catechisms. It is a tiny subset, but it is the subset we must depend on if we are to extract ourselves from a recession that could become a depression.

I am talking about the people who have the vision, knowledge, and leadership skills to create dynamic new companies.

Vision: Some people have a sixth sense that tells them where the markets are headed and what responses will best exploit the coming trends. These people are not infallible, and sometimes they get it wrong, but when they do they cut their losses and start again, because it’s in their DNA. Of course, to act on their vision they need

Knowledge: If the vision involves electronics, they must know electronics. If it involves pharmaceuticals, they must know medicine. Because we are talking about business opportunities, they must know the nuts and bolts of business, including finance and sales and, probably, manufacturing. Then, to give their new company critical mass, they need

Leadership skills. All the vision and knowledge in the world are useless without the ability to find, engage, motivate, and retain a work force that understands the dream and is inspired by it. We are talking now about communication skills, plus the indefinable quality that a platoon leader shows when he tells his troops “Follow me!” – and they do.

It is clear that we are talking about a rare combination of qualities. In many cases the visionary lacks one of the essentials, so a partner is found. Thus Dave Packard joined Bill Hewlett to found H-P, Larry Page joined Sergey Brin to found Google, Bob Noyce joined Gordon Moore to found Intel. Exceptional people all, and it is often impossible to know exactly which qualities were contributed by each member of the team.

Such people are a rare breed, much rarer than most people realize. (I worked for such a person for 27 years, so I know whereof I speak.) My guess is that in the whole United States there are no more than 10,000 people (and that's a generous estimate) who have the potential to create (or co-create) companies of substance. A few can create industries, and these are the rarest of the rare.

So, President-Elect Obama, don’t worry about rewarding capital or labor. That’s yesterday’s story. Concentrate on finding and motivating the 10,000 people who have the magic touch that can create a Google or an Intel or a Microsoft (or, for that matter, a Wal-Mart). You may say that education is the key, so we must have better schools. But that process takes years, and we need solutions now. The 10,000 are out there. Some have founded small companies and failed. Their next venture may be the next “new thing.” Some may be looking for the right partner. Some may need funding, just when the venture capitalists have gone missing. You can help, maybe. You could, for a start, sit down with someone like Steve Jobs or Larry Page for a brainstorming session on the subject of entrepreneurism. You need – we need - those 10,000 people in a hurry.

The Greatest Blog of the Year!!

The New York Times is hard up these days. It is selling its Manhattan building and trying to offload its interest in the Red Sox and its cable TV network. Circulation is down, and advertising revenues are getting killed by the internet and by the recession. What’s a newspaper to do?

Well, to start with, the Times should drastically hike its advertising rates. Huh? I thought you just said the recession is murdering advertising revenue. How can you possibly suggest raising rates?

I can because of the apparently inexhaustible supply of movie ads in the Times. Full pages and junior pages, telling us that Benjamin Button “sweeps you away,” Yes Man is “the best comedy of the year,” Valkyrie is “spine-tingling,” Last Chance Harvey is “too good to resist,” Slumdog Millionaire is “movie heaven,” Doubt is “the best picture of the year,” Bedtime Stories is “hysterically funny,” The Reader is “a masterpiece!” Seven Pounds is “a gift for moviegoers,” Milk is “an American classic,” Bolt is “the perfect holiday movie,” and Gran Torino is “a movie event.”

Then there are the message ads, full-page essays telling us that Israel must be defended, that the Arab Peace Initiative must be endorsed, that unions threaten the secret ballot. The Times lets all sorts of organizations use its pages as a megaphone. Nothing wrong in that; open discourse should be encouraged. But it is obvious (to me, at least) that the Times is renting that megaphone on the cheap.

Competition? Get real. Where else are these people going to go? The Times is the national newspaper. Movies need the Times. So does any group that wants to vent about any real or perceived injustice. The Times is Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park, the paper of record that legitimizes everything. The Dolphins didn’t beat the Jets until the Times said so.

The list price for a full-page in the Times is about $142,000. There is an “advocacy” rate of about $64,000, and there was a flap over which rate the Times should have charged MoveOn for its tasteless ad in which Petraeus was headlined as “Betray Us.” But the point is, even $142,000 is laughably low for a page in the Times, which says it will hold rates steady in 2009. In my opinion, those who want that megaphone would want it just as badly at $250,000 or more.

As for the movies, even the most marginal of them seem to be eager to pony up for a full page. Maybe they’re not talking to us, but to those who give out the awards. Whatever, my hunch is that the Times could double its movie ad rates without losing a single customer. After all, how much is too much to advertise the greatest, most spine-tingling, most unforgettable, most astounding, most spellbinding masterpiece of the year?

Olio

It’s snowing hard here today, with another storm predicted for the weekend, and still another a couple of days later. And winter hasn’t even begun yet. Last weekend we were without power, thanks to a vicious ice storm that hit Thursday night, and my son in New Hampshire still has no electricity. Most of the year, New England is a fine place to live, but from December through March the smart folks fly south with the geese. ……….The newspapers have been filled with stories about the discredited Governor of Illinois, who has become a bit of a joke. Alan Abelson of Barron’s notes that he “wore his hair in the fashion of Mamie Eisenhower or Laurence Olivier playing Henry V,” and the Economist says he “has the hair of a Kennedy and the tongue of a Soprano.”. ………On Broadway, theaters are going dark because of the recession. Gypsy, despite raves for Patti LuPone, played to 59 percent of the house last week and will close seven weeks early. Other shows (Grease, Hairspray) will close right after Christmas. Says a producer of Gypsy: “Psychologically, people feel it’s really frivolous to go to the theater at $200 a pop.” Well, of course. But it’s equally frivolous to go to a Patriots game or on a Caribbean cruise. The recession will teach people the difference between the necessities of life and the frivolities. Those unreal Goldman bonuses have disappeared from Wall Street, and it’s just a matter of time before people start asking whether a utility infielder is worth two million a year. ………Barack Obama’s first team looks pretty good so far, though I was rocked when his choice for Secretary of Education, the much-praised Arne Duncan, used his press conference to thank some benefactors “who gave my children and I” so much. Bad grammar is epidemic in Washington, but from the Secretary of Education?………… On the other hand, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sounds like my kind of guy. On the wall of his home in Washington, Admiral Mullen has, not military citations, but framed playbills from the Broadway shows he and his wife have seen. Mullen is an Annapolis man, but unlike, say, Senator McCain, he does not come from a military tradition. His Dad was a Hollywood press agent for, among others, Julie Andrews, Ann-Margret, and Dyan Canon…………The stock market continues to dive, and the talking heads on CNBC continue to advise – nay, plead – that now is the time to buy stocks. Never mind that the same people gave you the same advice six months ago. Some day they will be right, as a broken clock is eventually right, but by then all those who have taken their advice will be broke…………. A recent trip to the Maine Mall found almost all stores deserted. The Maine Mall is one of some 200 malls owned by General Growth Properties, which is trying desperately to stave off bankruptcy. Worth re-reading is my blog post “Overmalled,” dated October 29, 2007.

Twenty-Four Redux

I am not a devotee of the television series “24,” but I have seen enough episodes to know that the plot that animates the time line is based on the following premise: that there exist, in every corridor of power in the U.S. government, evil people who are spending every moment of every day trying to subvert the Constitution. Some of these people are rogue elements of the CIA or the FBI or the Secret Service. Some are holders of high offices, even the highest in the land. They will stop at nothing, not even assassination, to promote their agenda. If you buy into that theme, you will enjoy “24,” for of its type it is well done.

I never bought into it, and that is why my appreciation for its technical excellence was limited. A stray rogue organization might be credible, but to believe that our Government was so thoroughly riddled with corruption was just too much for me. The creators of The West Wing and the Bourne trilogy plowed similar ground, but “24” wanted you to believe that the bad guys in Washington outnumbered the good guys. I understood that the producers of the show needed a continuous stream of Judases within the Government to provide the drama, but I didn’t have to watch it.

Having declared my belief that the U.S. Government cannot be so radically infected as the “24” producers would have us believe, I also believe that the imminent transition from a hard-right to a leftish administration will not occur without residual rancor and, perhaps, the kinds of mischief that will give “24” another shot at credibility. The hawks and neocons will not disappear. They will retreat to save havens at the American Enterprise Institute, and they will snipe from the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. (John Bolton seems to have a long-term lease.) They will leave behind moles at Defense and State and the CIA who will feed them inside information.

Of course, sniping in the Wall Street Journal is not the same as sniping at Jack Bauer with a rifle. President Bush had his enemies, and Barack Obama will have his, and thank God for political criticism. But exiles on the left seem harmless. The louder they whine, the less effective they are (think Paul Krugman), but the zealots on the far right make much more credible villains.

Not that I’m worried about the integrity of the White House. Secretary of Defense Gates and National Security Advisor to-be Jones didn’t just drop off the turnip truck. But I do think that the scriptwriters for “24” must be licking their chops.

In Praise of Three Movies

Sydney Pollack directed some mediocre movies, some fair movies that are overrated, and a couple that are flat-out gems. One, in fact, deserves to be on anyone’s “ten best” list. It is Out of Africa, and it is so good that, despite its length, it wears well with a second or third viewing. How Pollack put it all together staggers the imagination, but one factoid illustrates his determination to get it right: Though the film was shot in Kenya, Pollack wanted animals that were not available locally, so he shipped them in by air from Europe!

Meryl Streep as Karen Blixen owns the picture, but the supporting cast is brilliant, especially Klaus Maria Brandauer as Karen’s husband. And Pollack gives us one terrific scene after another, set against the majestic African landscape. The story and script are solid, and John Barry’s score, like so many of his scores, is luscious. The tale is a sad one, ending with Blixen returning to Denmark, leaving behind her dead lover (Robert Redford) and her beloved native servants. But some sad (a better word would be “poignant”) stories leave you somehow uplifted, moved by the knowledge that you’ve just watched larger-than-life characters doing important things. Directing this movie must have been a Herculean undertaking, and off this one project Pollack ranks among the very best.

Most critics have given Out of Africa its due, and it deservedly won a Best Picture Oscar, but another Pollack film came and went without much notice, which is too bad because it, too, is Pollack at the top of his game. This was the 1995 remake of Sabrina.

Usually, I don’t see the point of remakes unless the original was a bad telling of a good story. But good movies are often recycled even though the original was just fine. I liked Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star Is Born, but I liked their predecessors, Janet Gaynor and Frederic March, at least as much. I thought Showboat with Irene Dunne was better than the later extravaganza with Katherine Grayson and everyone on the MGM lot. Marlon Brando, good as he is, couldn’t match Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty, nor could the talented Steve Martin compare with Spencer Tracy in Father of the Bride. The list goes on, but you get the idea.

But the original Sabrina was a badly flawed reworking of a witty Samuel Taylor play (Sabrina Fair), and it deserved another chance. All right, the original had Audrey Hepburn, but that is all it had. Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, two excellent actors, were horribly miscast as a tycoon and his playboy kid brother – just how miscast you realize when you see Pollack’s 1995 version. (I rewatched both versions recently.) Here Harrison Ford is believable as a captain of industry, and Greg Kinnear, a TV actor making his film debut, is a more than a believable playboy; in fact, he’s perfect.

Julia Ormond is no Audrey Hepburn, but she is a fine Sabrina – pretty and vulnerable, as she should be, in this Cinderella story of the chauffeur’s daughter and the millionaire. The color cinematography is a feast for the eyes (Paris, Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard). Best of all, Pollack resisted the temptation to “sex it up” for the juveniles in the audience and played it straight. You can poke a few holes in the plot, but so what? This is a romantic comedy, where you don’t analyze, you sit back and enjoy.

Another Samuel Taylor play that must be mentioned here is Avanti!, directed not by Sydney Pollack but by Billy Wilder. In fact, this may be the best of all the Wilder movies, if the least known and the most underrated. The plot: Important Businessman Wendell Armbruster, Jr. (Jack Lemmon) flies to Italy to collect the body of his father and bring it back to Baltimore for a big funeral. The old man, who died on vacation in Ischia, was head of Armbruster Industries, a major corporation, and the funeral will be sized accordingly (the Secretary of State will be among the dignitaries). En route to Ischia, Lemmon meets Pamela Piggott (Juliet Mills, of the theatrical Mills family), who is headed to Ischia to claim her mother’s body. It develops, to Armbruster’s (a) disbelief and (b) horror, that the two dead people have been trysting for years in Ischia and died together in a car crash.

That much alone is a pretty good framework for a play, but there’s much more to savor. The unctuous hotel manager (played wonderfully by Clive Revill) is one of several characters who will stick with you long after you’ve seen the movie, along with a valet who is shot by a housemaid because he done her wrong, a family of farmers who steal the bodies for ransom, an officious mortuary clerk with his ever-ready rubber stamp, the restaurant maitre d’ (who, when the dieting Pamela orders an apple for dinner, asks, obsequiously, “Shall I peel it for you?”).

In fact, it’s a hugely enjoyable movie, with gorgeous scenery and evocative Neapolitan music. Unfortunately, Lemmon is as miscast as a business big wheel as Humphrey Bogart was in Sabrina. He is too edgy, sort of like the kind of irritable scold he played in The Out of Towners. Wilder should have informed Lemmon that not all successful businessmen are pathological cranks (see Ford, Harrison, in Sabrina). But that minor complaint aside, this is one delicious movie, not to be missed.

The K Plan

In 1933, a Cambridge, MA electronics company faced the challenges of a deepening economic depression. Over an 18-year history, it had recruited a formidable engineering staff, mostly out of MIT, as well as a corps of highly skilled instrument assemblers. It had built an enviable reputation as the world leader in the technology of radio (the word “electronics” was just coming into vogue in 1933), and its name – General Radio Company – symbolized the breadth and depth of its ambitions.

But now, with sales dropping, General Radio faced a dilemma familiar to companies from that day to this: How do you preserve the treasure of the company – the talent you have marshaled over the years - when the money is running out? Some day that talent will be valuable again, if you can somehow keep the ship afloat during the gathering storm. But how?

The founder and President, a young Oregonian named Melville Eastham, huddled with his Treasurer, Henry Shaw, and the two dreamed up an innovative compensation scheme, unlike any other seen in the United States. If they were forced to slash expenses, say 20 percent, they would not react in the traditional way, cutting the work force by 20 percent. Instead, they would cut the work week by 20 percent. The 40-hour week would become a 32-hour week, trimming the payroll accordingly.

There was one hitch: While the loss of factory hours could easily be justified (if booms required overtime, why not undertime during busts?), the engineering hours were needed now more than ever, for the Company desperately needed the new products that would revive sales. So Eastham and Shaw devised a scheme for professionals they called “the K Plan.”

Here’s how it worked: Engineers and other professionals would have their monthly pay pegged to a “K” factor, which would rise and fall with the tide of business. If business (sales and bookings) were half of plan in a given month, K would be 0.5, and monthly salaries would be halved. And indeed, K started out at 0.5 in 1933. That was the downside (K would have a floor of 0.5). But if and when business recovered, K could rise, to a ceiling of 1.5. (Any surplus would be stored against future shortfalls.) Professionals were invited, not forced, to participate in the K Plan. To make it more attractive, the K factor was rigged to deliver a K of 1.1 when business met quota.

As a result of General Radio’s ingenious K Plan, the Company sailed through the Depression without laying off a single employee. In fact, when a local bank failed, the Company made employee-depositors whole. With the K Plan playing a decisive role, the Company didn’t simply survive the Depression; its fortunes took off later in the 1930s and flourished for decades after that. The K Plan remained in place for 36 years, serving as a cost control in the bad times and a strong motivator in the good times. The good times vastly outnumbered the bad, and the K factor remained well above unity throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

The kind of innovative thinking that produced the K Plan has been sorely lacking lately, and most companies now react to business slumps with knee-jerk layoffs – for some reason often carried out just before Christmas. Companies show little loyalty to their employees, who show just as little loyalty to their companies. It is a world Melville Eastham and Henry Shaw wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t like. The K Plan mightn’t work today; indeed, it was scrapped by a struggling General Radio in 1979. But it did enable one company to make it through the Great Depression with its workforce, its reputation, and its financial integrity intact. There’s a lesson there somewhere, if anyone is listening.

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Anyone interested in learning more about this Company should go to www.lulu.com and search for The General Radio Story.

Paying Off Detroit

The burning issue of the day in financial circles is: Should the taxpayer subsidize Detroit’s “big three” automakers by giving them tens of billions of dollars to help them avoid bankruptcy? Put me down in the “no” column. The arguments just don’t hold water. President-elect Obama says yes, because the automobile industry “is the backbone of manufacturing.” Nonsense. It might have been that 50 years ago, but in the information age one can make a more powerful argument on behalf of the computer and semiconductor industries. Is a healthy automobile industry an essential component of our defense capability? Ask General Petraeus whether he needs Humvees more than he needs battlefield computers and communications.

My children, their spouses, my wife and I drive a total of eight automobiles. Seven of the eight were made by Japanese manufacturers. So Detroit’s share of this micro-market is 12.5 percent. It is not that we have an affinity for Japan or that we wanted to buy the cheapest cars. We thought the Japanese cars were just better than the U.S. alternatives. After driving them hundreds of thousands of miles, we still think so.

I don’t know anything about automobile manufacturing, but I do know something about the electronics industry. Today, most of our telephones, computer motherboards, television sets, DVD players, and radios are made in other countries. Does anybody care about that? Maybe they should, but globalization is a fact of life. Most of the best electronics engineers happen to be Asian. It wasn’t so 40 years ago, but it is true today. The same can be said of automotive engineers. Meanwhile, our educational machinery keeps turning out more sociologists and journalists and public-affairs specialists. And lawyers, lots of lawyers.

The clamor to bail out Detroit is wholly political. It has nothing to do with merit. It has everything to do with jobs and unions and their political allies. The worst part is that the bailout won’t work. “We just need a loan to get us through this valley” is how one industry advocate put it. But it is not a valley, but an abyss, not a loan but a political payoff. It won’t make me trade in my Accord for a Chevrolet. It will just postpone the inevitable demise of companies gone bad – and add to our staggering national debt.

A Cicero for Our Time

My high school days were filled with stories of ancient Rome and Greece, written in the language of those civilizations by the likes of Caesar and Horace and Homer and Xenophon. And the writings of Cicero, said to be the greatest orator of all time. Cicero left nothing on YouTube, so we can’t judge for ourselves, but I’ll take the words of his contemporaries. His Greek model was Demosthenes, who practiced his oratory by talking with pebbles in his mouth and shouting over the roar of the waves while running along the beach.

Oratory is largely a lost art, although historians credit Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill and John Kennedy with the ability to match the challenges of their times with the power of their rhetoric. I have heard Churchill and Kennedy, and I think their reputations owe more to their writing (or that of their speechwriters) than to their speaking ability. From what I have read, Lincoln was both a great writer and a great speaker.

Last night Barack Obama, speaking in Chicago, reminded me of the enormous power of political oratory. To grasp the effect of that 17-minute speech, one must watch the audience as well as the President-Elect. Tears on cheeks, rapture on faces, hushed reverence at inspirational moments – the speaker connected with over 100,000 celebrants in Grant Park in a way that no other politician has in my lifetime. Not Kennedy, not Clinton, not Reagan. It was electric.

Politics is not just about issues. It is also about emotions, about the capacity of a good person to project that goodness to an audience by sound and sight. Barack Obama has that capacity in spades, and either he is either exactly the leader this country needs at this moment or we have all been duped by his oratorical skill. I am by nature an optimist, so I lean to the positive view.

He is the Cicero of our time. It will be fascinating to watch and listen to this truly remarkable man as he embarks on his historic journey.

I Want It All, and I Want It Now

The current financial tsunami had its roots, most people agree, in the overleveraging of the American consumers, who bought houses they couldn’t afford, vacation condos they couldn’t afford, and a lifestyle that could be supported only as long as banks flooded the market with easy credit. People may disagree on who is mostly to blame- greedy banks or greedy (or dumb) borrowers, but everyone agrees that consumers were way over their heads and that a good bucket of cold water is long overdue.

It is disheartening, therefore, to see a major credit-card issuer (Chase) advertising the joys of living high on plastic to the strains of a hard-driving jingle whose lyrics go like this:

I want it all
I want it all
And I want it now!

What are these guys thinking? Don’t they know what’s going on in the land? Where are those indignant Congressional committees, the committees that posture before the TV cameras and huff and puff about Fannie and Freddie and regulators and golden parachutes and overpaid executives? Do they watch television? Do they know that people are still being urged to borrow, borrow, borrow? I still get solicitations from credit-card issuers, some of them with checks that have my name printed on them. I should rush right out and cash these checks, they tell me, even though they don’t have the foggiest idea of my financial situation.

Today a press release announced that the Federal Government will buy $3.55 billion worth of stock plus warrants in Capital One Financial, one of the most aggressive of the credit-card pitchmen. (“What’s in your wallet?”) The Government will not buy stock in fast-food restaurants or semiconductor makers or struggling software companies, most of whom need the help, but it will buy stock in Capital One, which may use the $3.55 billion for more TV ads and more direct mailers to lure more pigeons to take out credit cards they shouldn’t have.

People were so burned up the first time the bail-out was floated that their anger caused the House to defeat the bill. A few days later, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke frightened Congress into passing the legislation. Hank and Ben, the Great Facilitators.
We certainly don’t want to kill the credit-card economy, do we? Is this a great country or what?

I Like Ike

People tend to look back, not in anger, but in wistfulness. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and it filters out the bad times and highlights the good. Our high-school years tend to be more sweet than bitter, because those were the years of early discovery, of awakening to life’s possibilities.

But a reading of history, when you are older, often throws a bucket of cold water on those memories. The sixties, no matter what your personal experiences, must be counted as a bad time in America (and, for that matter, in Europe). It was a decade of assassinations and pointless wars and social unrest. The forties, romanticized today by the strains of Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again,” saw unspeakable horror. The decade of the thirties was also elevated by its music. Depression? Not if you listen to the score of 42d Street. We’re in the money, ready to shuffle off to Buffalo.

But the fifties – ah, there was a time to savor. With Dwight Eisenhower looking over us, the Soviet Union a threat that had yet to materialize, Japan devastated and China still in its dark ages, we had nothing to do but enjoy life and a monopoly of economic power. The colleges were full of students (the GI bill), television offered Playhouse 90 and Sid Caesar (nothing that would offend your wife or mother), and Ted Williams and Warren Spahn delighted Boston baseball fans. There was a war in Korea, but our cause was unambiguous (the North invaded the South), and there were no protests. The fifties were not unalloyed bliss (what is?), but looking back over the sweep of the last seven-plus decades, the fifties stand out as a sort of golden age in the United States.

If you’ve been reading these blogs for a while, you know that one of my passions centers on the American musical theater, and so it must be mentioned that most aficionados believe that the fifties constituted the golden age of musicals. Guys and Dolls led the parade, followed down Broadway by The King and I, The Pajama Game, Fanny, Silk Stockings, Damn Yankees, My Fair Lady, The Most Happy Fella, West Side Story, The Music Man, The Sound of Music, and so many other evergreen shows.

Could we have another decade like it? No; it was sui generis, bookcased by a unique set of circumstances – a world war behind, Vietnam to come. But I keep coming back to the reassuring presence of Dwight Eisenhower in the White House. He is usually not numbered among the great presidents, but maybe he should be. Is there such a reassuring presence waiting in the wings today? The only person I can think of is Colin Powell. He alone has the temperament, the gravitas, the presence to be another Eisenhower, but he has declined to run.

It will be interesting to see how the country shakes out after the elections. The atmosphere is so toxic as to make national unity difficult, and a deepening recession may make it impossible. The new president will have to reach across party lines in the composition of his cabinet and in the formation of his policies – immediately and dramatically. Anything less will guarantee four years of the kind of hate-filled politics we never knew back in the good old days.

None of the Above

I have never sat out a presidential election, not since I started voting, but this year’s selection leaves me cold. I will vote, but probably not for the top of the ticket. The problems I have with both candidates are just too serious.

For McCain: He keeps talking about “victory” in Iraq and Afghanistan, as if victory in any reasonable sense of the word was possible. The Aghans (with our aid) were able to drive the Russians out some years ago. This time it’s different, said one of the prominent neocons in an interview, because the Aghans didn’t like the Russians, but they like us(!). If McCain really intends to hang in there until we defeat the insurgents, our children and grandchildren will still be fighting in that God-forsaken place decades hence.

If that weren’t enough, there’s Sarah Palin. If placing Sarah the so-called heartbeat away from the presidency was an example of McCain’s judgment, this alone should disqualify him. Yes, she had momentary pop-star quality, but so what? We’re talking about the presidency here, not a People magazine celebrity. She can’t do much harm in Wasilla, but she can do a whole lot of harm in Washington.

Finally, I fear that McCain sees himself as a warrior, and I worry that the same hawks who brought us Iraq will counsel him to bomb or invade Iran and North Korea. We’ve tried war; it’s time to try diplomacy.

Now to Obama: He endlessly tells us that he will lower taxes for 95 percent of us, which, if people vote their pocketbooks, should guarantee a landslide. But what about the other five percent? Let’s say that the top one or two percent – the Warren Buffets and Bill Gateses – don’t care, because they’re tax-proof. Question: How many of the next three percentiles are the very people we need to dig us out of this recession? I am talking about the managers and accountants and venture capitalists whose brains and talents we so desperately need right now? I am also talking about the doctors Obama will need to implement his ambitious expansion of health care services and the scientists and engineers he will need in order to help us invent our way to energy independence.

Let's say you are flying in a jetliner that is trying to land during a storm at night, with one engine shut down because of an oil leak. Is this the time you want to start arguing that pilots are overpaid? Or do you want the very best, most overpaid pilot you can find at the controls? Right now the economy is trying to land in a storm, and it has sprung a leak.


Notwithstanding Wall Street's recent excesses, we are still a meritocracy, and the Obama tax plan takes dead aim at that notion, not just through the higher tax rates but through means-testing, vanishing exemptions and the like. If it were just another transparent ploy to win votes it would be understandable, but I am afraid Obama’s convictions are as sincere as they are misguided. If only he had spent a few years running a small company....

Obama’s protectionism (rewarding companies that keep jobs in the U.S.) is hard to understand in one whose background should engender a world view. His is a foolish plan, because it would lead to retaliation. Borrowing two billion dollars a day from overseas lenders, we obviously need to cultivate relations with China, Russia, India, etc., not antagonize them. In this respect, McCain and Obama are equally culpable.


We have had flawed candidates and flawed presidents before, and we have always muddled through, as we will this time. But I do fear the interregnum between Election Day and the January inauguration. Polarization is high in the land, and the world situation is a tinderbox. The opportunity for mischief-makers, domestic or foreign, has never been higher.

Sea Change

The ocean looks different now. The sun is lower, so that its light bounces off the water and right into your eyes as you walk along the beach, as I just did. I walked a couple of miles on the hard sand (the tide was low), sharing the morning with only a few seagulls. There was hardly a cloud to be seen, the blue sky and the bluer water creating a dazzling seascape.

The scene makes it easy to forget the turbulence that besets the country these days. The economy has begun to weather its own sea change, the most pronounced since World War 2. The ship of state was foundering in 1968, but it was nothing like this. If you are as old as I am, you may remember 1968 as the year of assassinations and Kent State and the Democratic convention in Chicago. It was a rough time, but with one crucial difference: The economy was in good shape in 1968. I know because in that year I walked away from a good job with an established company to join a small start-up. I wouldn’t be so brave in today’s economy. Viet Nam was an unpopular war, as Iraq is today, but the moral angst of voters was not matched by economic angst, and Hubert Humphrey was not willing to break sharply with his President on the War, so Nixon won.

Today, people are fed up with the mid-East war and they are also losing their jobs and their homes and their retirement nest-eggs. That’s a poisonous combination for the incumbent party, and Senator McCain has abandoned all pretense of promoting his own programs or philosophy and is directing his entire advertising budget to a single theme: his opponent is not to be trusted.

It’s a doubtful theme, but what else does he have? Like Hubert Humphrey, he cannot declare the war a bad idea from the get-go. He can no longer insist that the fundamentals of the economy are sound, because events have given free-market capitalism a bad name.

Obama is clearly ahead in the polls (if one can trust them), and experts, including some Republicans, are starting to speculate on an Obama landslide. The McCain partisans hope for a close victory; no one is predicting a McCain runaway. Indeed, some Republicans see a silver lining here: Things are so bad that the winner is doomed to failure, setting the stage for a Republican comeback in 2012. You take your solace where you find it.

Whoever wins will have to deal with an economic sea change sweeping over the nation. Times will be tough, much tougher than either candidate dares describe. We have been living beyond our means for years, and learning to live within our means will force a painful readjustment. The credit cards will have to be cut up and thrown in the garbage.

The First Presidential Debate

The presidential debates are all a matter of managing expectations. The first debate was no exception. I expected Senator McCain to stumble a lot and to lose his temper at least once. He did neither. He exceeded my expectations. I expected Barak Obama to dance verbal rings around his opponent, landing light jabs all along the way. He did not. He barely met my expectations. I agree with those who called the contest a draw.

But the fact that Obama failed to exploit McCain’s missteps does not mean the opportunities were not there. Example: Senator McCain made much of the fact that he, the proven warrior and world-affairs expect, would not leave Iraq until we could leave in victory. As he saw it, the rookie Obama wanted out, the sooner the better, no matter the conditions on the ground. An old pro like McCain knew better; he would stay in Iraq until his generals said it was safe to leave.

But, Obama could have pointed out, President Bush and Secretary Rice both tell us repeatedly that Iraq is a sovereign country, which means the exit plan is really up to them, not President McCain or his generals. Or is this too naïve?

Or take Senator McCain on Pakistan’s General Musharraf. When Obama mentioned that we seemed to support a dictator because “he was our dictator,” McCain defended the General by saying that everybody knows that Pakistan was a failed state when Musharraf took over. Leaving aside the obvious question (wouldn’t any would-be dictator simply declare his country to be a failed state?), General Musharraf remained president from 1999 to 2008. Couldn’t he have turned the country over to civilian authority sooner? But Senator Obama did not pounce here either, because, I guess, pouncing is not his style.

But there were opportunities lost on the other side, too. Senator Obama again castigated companies who moved jobs offshore and promised a tax system that would favor companies that kept jobs at home. A sharper, quicker Senator McCain might have pressed his opponent to flesh out his plan. U.S. companies have hundreds of thousands of overseas employees; will we insist that those jobs come home? Suppose there is a backlash against our exports? Or worse, against our Treasury bonds? And by the way, does Senator Obama really mean to rewrite Nafta, even if Canada and Mexico like it the way it is? How, precisely, would Senator Obama turn back the tide of globalization?

Senator McCain obviously favors a more “muscular” approach to foreign policy, particularly with respect to Russia, China, and Iran. He seems to embrace the neo-con line, and although that may play well at military posts and Legion halls, I’m not sure it’s much of a vote-getter in a national election. Senator Obama’s protectionism and Senator McCain’s hawkishness are of a piece, and neither inspires much confidence.

On style points, I think his handlers should tell McCain to lose a bit of his edge. He did not blow a gasket, but just underneath the forced smile I sensed that he was often seething. And Obama needs to add a bit of “no more mister nice-guy.” Just a bit. The man is cool, and that will be a huge advantage if he becomes president. But in debates, you win by scoring debating points.

This Time It Is Different

Most economic commentators who parade before the CNBC cameras tell us that the market will come back because (1) recessions in the past have lasted so many months on average, and based on that we may expect a recovery in early 2010 (2) the Dow Jones Industrial average has in previous bear markets declined by such-and-such a percent, and based on that we are almost at the bottom. History is the great teacher, and history tells us that a new up cycle will soon make everything all right.

Readers of this blog know that for the past year I have been warning everyone to stay clear of the stock market. Go back, if you must, and reread The Fed Caves (8-18-07), The “What, Me Worry?” Economy (7-26-07), The Great Buying Opportunity (4-12-07), Overmalled (10-29-07), The Next Bubble (2-21-07), The End of the Game (7-14-08), and Calling a Spade a Spade (4-7-08). I am not an economist, so I got it right. Economists, almost by definition, worship economic history.

What makes this time so different? China, for one thing, makes it different. China not only as competitor, but as financier. The people who are hastily cobbling together the $700 billion bailout plan initially decreed that only U.S. banks could be bailed out. Then someone whispered that if we stiffed China and other sources of sovereign wealth they might be reluctant to lend money to us. Oops.

After years of hectoring China and Russia for an economic system that smothered innovation, they got the message. They and others decided to play the game, and they are good at it. They are not so good at human rights, so now we hector them about Tibet and Georgia. But not too loud, because we need their money (China) and oil (Russia).

A few years after Tiananmen Square, I found myself in Beijing, talking with a bright young college graduate who had been present at the student uprising. I wanted to know whether in her opinion the country could revert to the old system, stamping out entrepreneurism, “There is no chance,” she said. “There is no turning back now.”

So here we are, with China and Russia, two former communist adversaries, both racing down the capitalist track, while the United States is about to nationalize much of its financial system. They move to the right, while we abandon what is left of laissez faire and turn leftward. The Administration tells us that we have no choice, that if we don’t rescue the banks we face Armageddon. (The parallels with the “mushroom cloud” scenario that provided the rationale for invading Iraq are obvious.) High drama in Washington and New York, the stuff of action films starring Denzel Washington.

Congress will oblige, because most Congressmen accept the fact that they don’t understand the arcana of modern finance - but Paulson and Bernanke do. Hank Paulson is regarded as a financial guru, because he was once Chairman of Goldman Sachs, the largest and most successful investment banker on Wall Street. You might think, after recent events, that fact in itself would disqualify him, but you’d be wrong, unfortunately.

The situation is just as dire as Messrs Paulson and Bernanke paint it, but the solution they propose is a stake in the heart of capitalism. The United States has turned a corner, and, as my young Chinese friend said, there is no turning back. Who knows where it will lead, when retirees depending on “defined contribution” pensions find their nest eggs gone, when the government owns millions of foreclosed properties for which there are no buyers, when unemployment jumps because companies can no longer finance expansion, when hundreds of thousands of troops come home looking for jobs that aren’t there?

We are headed inevitably to a world where the government will be the employer of last resort, the financier of last resort, the health-care provider of last resort, the mortgage provider of last resort. This time it really is different.

Of Thee I Sing, Baby

In 1932 the blockbuster Broadway musical was Of Thee I Sing, with a score by George and Ira Gershwin and a libretto by George S. Kaufman. Actually, it opened at the Music Box Theater the day after Christmas, 1931 – great timing, inasmuch as it was a spoof of presidential politics, much on the national mind in 1932. It had a run of 441 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize, the first musical to do so.

The plot: If elected, presidential candidate John P. Wintergreen promises to marry the winner of a First Lady contest. A femme fatale, Diana Devereaux, walks off with the prize by sleeping with the judges, but Wintergreen nonetheless marries his true love, Mary Turner, a wholesome lass who wins Wintergreen’s heart by baking incredibly tasty corn muffins.

Wintergreen is elected and subsequently impeached (he is a lovable rogue, the Bill Clinton of his era), but Mary saves the day by declaring that she’s pregnant. Who, after all, would dare impeach an expectant father?

There’s much to love in the plot, including diplomatic squabbles with France and the bumblings of Vice-President Alexander Throttlebottom. Then there is that socko Gershwin score, featuring future standards like “Who Cares?,” “Love is Sweeping the Country,” and of course the title song. It was, all in all, a wonderful show, set, as I’ve mentioned, against the background of the FDR-Hoover presidential campaign.

It is time for another Broadway musical based on a political satire. I hereby offer the following outline:

Presidential candidate John P. Peppermint struggles to choose a running mate, the most obvious choices having various shortcomings. Then Peppermint’s brain trust suggests a contest, the winner to be the person who serves the best home-cooked meal. Several male veep wannabes do their best, but the prize goes to lovely Sara Lee, the governor of a desolate, remote, snow-covered State. Sara wins the contest by preparing a delicious caribou roast. But that’s not all; she shoots the caribou with her rifle and cleans it expertly. “That’s my kind of girl,” says John P. Peppermint.

Alas, Sara, it turns out, comes with baggage: As governor, she has used her power to fix a dog-sled race and to settle various personal scores. But, at the end of Act 2, just when it appears that all is lost, Sara announces that she will soon become both a new mother and a new grandmother. The race is over, for who can vote against such a woman? As the curtain falls, the entire cast celebrates the landslide victory by singing, “Of Thee I Sing, Sara.”

It needs work, but it has possibilities.

"What Do We Do Now?"

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.