Aug
27
Richard Dreyfuss, speaking to Keahi Tucker on “Sunrise” Wednesday morning from the Democratic National Convention in Denver, said it’s time to bring in Hollywood directors to manage such events.
Dreyfuss said presidential nominating conventions have gradually become celebrations of decisions that have already been made, so organizers might as well abandon the pretense, admit that the purpose is spectacle, and hire professionals to put the spectacle together.
Dreyfuss, who is a Democrat, specified that he is referring to both parties.
To some extent, of course, this has happened already. Who speaks at which hour on which night is determined in part by a narrative thread. But it’s also determined by political considerations.
I notice, for example, that at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., next week, a number of governors including Linda Lingle have been lined up to speak on the same night as Mike Huckabee, the closest thing to a challenger in the later months of the campaign, and it occurred to me when I saw this that someone might have been playing down Huckabee’s appearance by putting him in a crowd.
The people who do manage these events, if not yet willing to hand the reins to Steven Spielberg or whomever, are not unwilling to take leaves from their books. Hillary speaks, then the director cuts to a camera focusing on Bill, and Bill leaps to his feet — he’s a FAN of his wife! — even if half the stuff the comics say about their marriage is true.
Unplanned touches can stick in the memory. The morning after Sen. Ted Kennedy gave his rousing speech to the convention, a senior writer for the Associated Press wrote a nice summary of Kennedy’s career from the perspective of his convention appearances and absences — which reminded me of the night Jimmy Carter was nominated, when Kennedy, having given him an endorsement that sounded ambiguous to me, shook Carter’s hand but then moved to the opposite side of the stage and avoided Carter’s attempts at a further physical display of unity. (The article, and so many others, referred to this as Kennedy’s “last hurrah,” and I wonder how many who used the phrase knew it came from a novel about a Boston politician.)
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, made a point of being unequivocal about endorsing Barack Obama. She had not fought all these years, she said, to have a Republican in the White House again. It was an ingenious way of putting the point. In just a handful of words, she told her diehard supporters why they shouldn’t make trouble, and she made it about her, so that anything they did would be to her, not to that other guy.
I have never been a big Hillary fan, and at several points in the campaign I felt like she was trying to arrogate to herself the credit for feminist advances really made by others. Stuff that Geraldine Ferraro had the right to say (the cracks in the glass ceiling, etc.) seemed less persuasive from a woman who rode her husband’s coattails to the national political scene. But in her endorsement speech there was nothing of the borderline petulance of Kennedy’s endorsement of Carter in the 1970s; rather than undermine her own endorsement by looking forward to her own future, she concentrated on persuading her faithful to do as she was doing.
The speech was the more interesting for the suspense that led up to it, and I wonder if a Hollywood director could manufacture that. But there is also the matter of news coverage. News operations don’t like to cover foregone conclusions, and if the last vestiges of unpredictability were to be squeezed out of these events, it wouldn’t be long before political nominating conventions were relegated to one cable channel, probably the same one that does the dog shows.
Dreyfuss doubtless has seen the movie “Wag the Dog,” which Dustin Hoffman plays a Hollywood producer who is hired by the White House to orchestrate a war. I was still living in Washington, D.C., when that movie came out, but was returning from several weeks in Hawaii and spent a couple days in Los Angeles on the way back, and saw the film in Santa Barbara, Calif., where a lot of movie industry people live. The house was packed and everybody thought the film was hilarious, as did I. When I got back to D.C. I was surprised to find that the prevailing view was that the movie was NOT funny because it “got so many things wrong.”
Hollywood and Washington have always had an incomplete understanding of each other, but they are drawn to each other, and they influence each other, and Dreyfuss probably isn’t the only one thinking that what these political conventions need is less Hollywood and more Washington.
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I,too, was not a Hillary Clinton fan during the campaign for the Democratic Party’s Presidential Compaign BUT I found her speech at the DCC awesome. She knew what she had to do for the Party. This is the woman who stood by a man who continues to fall into the “zipper trap”-but she stands by him. This is why women need to realize that they have more strength of character, loyalty and farsightedness than they think. Her speech was a call to participation by a woman for the nation. Too bad McCain only sees women as a means to an end. GO OBAMA!