Journeys with George.
Last night I watched Alexandra Pelosi's movie about early Bush, embarrassing Bush, Bush before 911 Changed Everything.
It was good. The one question that has haunted and obsessed me for the last several years is how the hell Bush managed to win the 2000 election. This is a wholly separate question from the question of how Gore managed to lose the election -- liberals have a thousand answers to that one. I accept some and reject others. If you didn't like Gore, you could have stayed home. But turnout went up from '96 and, anyway, despite the media cynicism, polls found voters relatively content with the choice that year and far less cynical about politics in general than they'd been in either of the two Clinton elections. There wasn't much third-party voting or ballot spoilage compared to '96. Gore outpolled the Senate and Congressional Dems nationally in the two-party match-up. And, yet, 50 million people voted for Dubya. How? Why?
Pelosi's film provides a partial answer. You watch Journeys with George and you understand how it happened, which makes me feel better about Americans, or maybe about myself as a half-American. Bush is like the perfect Congressional candidate. You'd trust him implicitly to slap the right backs in Washington and bring home the bacon for his district. As a senator (assuming he was smart enough to be a senator), Bush could have rivaled Robert Byrd as a pork-generator and patriotic pontificator (so help me Gawd!). What with all his connections and lack of self-conciousness and that too-fake-to-be-fake folksiness, he was born to straddle the line between Big Bizness and Big Politics. Can't you picture him out on the golf course with Jack Abramoff and then that vacant stare he'd affect when called on accepting a bribe? So why -- some genius thought -- why not take it to the next level? That thinking is manifest all through Pelosi's film. You have in Bush simultaneously the perfect politician and the worst conceivable presidential candidate thrust headlong in a presidential campaign about trivialities. You had peace, prosperity, the end of economics, and a Democrat who'd once tried to pass an energy tax and wrote essays for The New Republic in his spare time. OK. I get it. I get it.
The film isn't perfect. Toward the end, there's the liberal money-quote, as some British journalist admits to Pelosi he's not sure the "pack" always does the right thing, that maybe they were too easy on Bush because "he charmed the pants off us". But there's nothing in the film that really confirms this idea. The "pack" in the movie rides on the bus, eats and complains about the GOP's food, throws drunken parties in the back of the press plane, grows increasingly removed from reality, sleeps with each other and cracks mean jokes about the candidate behind his back. The only member of the press who doesn't appear to share in the press' fundamental contempt for Bush is Pelosi -- which is why she's such a winsome, appealing narrator, and why the movie works, even toward the end when her access tries up and the movie becomes nothing more than a blow-by-blow account of the 2000 campaign, punctuated by scenes of Pelosi shouting questions to various Bushies that elicit neither answer nor even ironic or annoyed glance in response. The magic comes early in the film, including all those images of Rove before Rove was just evil. It's sad in a way, their descent from an interesting bad idea to the national catastrophe we see today. It's the end of (relative) innocence.
Journeys with George is also sort of interesting in retrospect knowing how Pelosi went on to make another documentary about the 2004 Democratic primary called Diary of a Political Tourist, which I have yet to see but which got trashed by pundits (including most liberal pundits) as snide, obvious and unnecessary -- full of scenes of major Democrats trying to avoid her like you'd avoid Maureen Dowd. It's interesting to think that when Pelosi turned from a quizzical look at GOP amiable dunce-ness (the meme of 2000) to a quizzical look at Dem ineptitude (the meme going into 2004), she lost her charm -- at least to Dem-leaners. From Journeys with George, you can just see how it's possible. But in this film she's got a lot of charm. And she helps unravel what I think remains the big mystery of American politics -- how the hell Bush ended up in the White House.
It was good. The one question that has haunted and obsessed me for the last several years is how the hell Bush managed to win the 2000 election. This is a wholly separate question from the question of how Gore managed to lose the election -- liberals have a thousand answers to that one. I accept some and reject others. If you didn't like Gore, you could have stayed home. But turnout went up from '96 and, anyway, despite the media cynicism, polls found voters relatively content with the choice that year and far less cynical about politics in general than they'd been in either of the two Clinton elections. There wasn't much third-party voting or ballot spoilage compared to '96. Gore outpolled the Senate and Congressional Dems nationally in the two-party match-up. And, yet, 50 million people voted for Dubya. How? Why?
Pelosi's film provides a partial answer. You watch Journeys with George and you understand how it happened, which makes me feel better about Americans, or maybe about myself as a half-American. Bush is like the perfect Congressional candidate. You'd trust him implicitly to slap the right backs in Washington and bring home the bacon for his district. As a senator (assuming he was smart enough to be a senator), Bush could have rivaled Robert Byrd as a pork-generator and patriotic pontificator (so help me Gawd!). What with all his connections and lack of self-conciousness and that too-fake-to-be-fake folksiness, he was born to straddle the line between Big Bizness and Big Politics. Can't you picture him out on the golf course with Jack Abramoff and then that vacant stare he'd affect when called on accepting a bribe? So why -- some genius thought -- why not take it to the next level? That thinking is manifest all through Pelosi's film. You have in Bush simultaneously the perfect politician and the worst conceivable presidential candidate thrust headlong in a presidential campaign about trivialities. You had peace, prosperity, the end of economics, and a Democrat who'd once tried to pass an energy tax and wrote essays for The New Republic in his spare time. OK. I get it. I get it.
The film isn't perfect. Toward the end, there's the liberal money-quote, as some British journalist admits to Pelosi he's not sure the "pack" always does the right thing, that maybe they were too easy on Bush because "he charmed the pants off us". But there's nothing in the film that really confirms this idea. The "pack" in the movie rides on the bus, eats and complains about the GOP's food, throws drunken parties in the back of the press plane, grows increasingly removed from reality, sleeps with each other and cracks mean jokes about the candidate behind his back. The only member of the press who doesn't appear to share in the press' fundamental contempt for Bush is Pelosi -- which is why she's such a winsome, appealing narrator, and why the movie works, even toward the end when her access tries up and the movie becomes nothing more than a blow-by-blow account of the 2000 campaign, punctuated by scenes of Pelosi shouting questions to various Bushies that elicit neither answer nor even ironic or annoyed glance in response. The magic comes early in the film, including all those images of Rove before Rove was just evil. It's sad in a way, their descent from an interesting bad idea to the national catastrophe we see today. It's the end of (relative) innocence.
Journeys with George is also sort of interesting in retrospect knowing how Pelosi went on to make another documentary about the 2004 Democratic primary called Diary of a Political Tourist, which I have yet to see but which got trashed by pundits (including most liberal pundits) as snide, obvious and unnecessary -- full of scenes of major Democrats trying to avoid her like you'd avoid Maureen Dowd. It's interesting to think that when Pelosi turned from a quizzical look at GOP amiable dunce-ness (the meme of 2000) to a quizzical look at Dem ineptitude (the meme going into 2004), she lost her charm -- at least to Dem-leaners. From Journeys with George, you can just see how it's possible. But in this film she's got a lot of charm. And she helps unravel what I think remains the big mystery of American politics -- how the hell Bush ended up in the White House.
2 Comments:
Not 100% on-topic here, but after reading this I dug up an old comment of yours where you say that "losing in 2000 was a liberal-progressive tragedy of unspeakable, handwringable proportions." I don't know about handwringable, but it's the very definition of unspeakable. It's impossible for me to try to clearly visualize what a Gore-victory world would look like for any considerable length of time. I just get overwhelmed with the horrific dependence of so much in history on Teresa Lepore's inability to design ballots properly, and I can't keep thinking about it.
Well, yeah. I hope somebody writes an alternative history sometime. But the context of that comment, if I recall correctly, was that 2000 being handwringable was a product of losing in 2004, and that I hadn't seen it that way before.
I had a long chat with my dad about this recently, after he watched the film. I guess it's just that in retrospect I understand Bush's appeal in 2004 -- he was serious; there was massive backlash against the liberal-elite straw man. But I don't get his appeal in 2000. Not then. Not now. He simply had no appeal, unless it was backlash appeal and the polls suggested it wasn't a backlash election outside the GOP base. People liked Bush, and liked Gore reasonably well too. They saw something in Bush. What could it possibly have been? I see it a little bit in the film -- he's tenatious. He faces the reporters who hate him and wins them over. He gets in Nancy Pelosi's daughter's face. He's so... average, but popular-average.
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