“The Master”—the times aren’t any crazier today

Hollywood prospers by exploiting what’s festering in the heads of millions of Americans—enough heads to make a blockbuster or, maybe, carry half a dozen swing states on an election day. Consequently, political junkies follow American film. (Wild audience enthusiasm for Dirty Harry certainly provided plenty of guidance on how to navigate and understand Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority and Law and Order campaigns.) 

Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant new film The Master offers something entirely different, and better, than any of Hollywood’s contemporary political dramas.

Overwrought post-debate partisans and political analysts who believe that presidential elections are in-depth profiles of—and telling battles over—the minds of American individuals, should find it rather relaxing. The Master demonstrates that today’s tricksters aren’t especially talented and that our stresses today are not especially insane making.  

Anderson doesn’t explicitly address the political strains of the1950’s, Joe McCarthy, the Bomb, the Cold War, white hypocrisy, or racial segregation. He concentrates every scene on a manipulative cult leader and a seething, unsettled veteran of the Second World War. For aggregators and “cleavage politics” marketers, he offers nothing but a couple of hours of dazzling escape.

However, you will get a feel for a time of extraordinary newness, curiosity, and unmanageable anxiety. It’s humbling and reassuring at the same time.

Obama: don’t start using the “l” word

The first reaction of nice children when they hear there is no Santa Claus is to insist, “That’s not true.” When cornered, the more high-spirited may call you a “liar.” It’s just what they do. Mitt Romney didn’t give the Democrats the election as a Christmas present in last week’s debate. High-spirited Democrats and Jon Stewart now insist that Barack Obama could save the election and, also, finally sound like a real American if he ran around calling Mitt Romney a liar too. Don’t bite, Barack Obama, and don’t send Joe Biden out to do it for you.

Even calling politicians liars is unrewarding.

In this election, the mainstream media contracted out that work to independent business units called “fact-checkers.” They spend almost all their time sitting on the fence. Hopefully, they’ll find alternative, less unpleasant work after November 6.

The problem is that leveling the “l” word against a fellow American is rarely easy or safe. (Few vice-presidential candidates, for instance, take an hour off their best time in a running sport dominated by stopwatches.)

Unless we’ve already entered that state of partisan grace that allows us to believe unimaginably bad things about the other side, when we’re told someone is a liar, we’re forced to think, to demonstrate to yourself that we’re fair and not just politicians too.  

Consequently, being asked to recognize Mitt Romney as a liar is much harder than asking us to put ourselves in Obama’s shoes and vote early. It’s like asking a good employee to go back to the office and work on an August weekend.

Sorting out what is imagined and what is true in budget plans and in the death science of economics is asking the impossible, especially in the passionate final days of a bitter election.

Obama’s problem in the first debate wasn’t that he didn’t use the “l” word, but that he didn’t defend himself effectively and have fun with Romney’s weaknesses as the political leader of today’s Republican government-in-waiting.

Romney is, of course, a mischievous data man. Indeed, he’s made a quarter of a $billion, in part, by attractively organizing slide decks of factlets and zingers.

Last night on CNN, for instance, he could market the idea that his tax plan could create exactly 7 million new jobs, while at the same time, he could slam the very word "stimulus" and refuse to reveal one number from the tax plan he’d bring to the table as president in the next big negotiation on Washington’s finances.

Nevertheless, Obama should stick to the politics of who Romney actually is and represents.

Obama’s campaign has rather well followed the music of an old generality authored, I recall, by Norman Mailer in the late 60s: Democrats believe they are of the people. Republicans believe they are for the people.

It must be a source of great comfort for Mitt Romney to believe, as he breathlessly insists, that his heart is in the right place. Let’s even imagine he’d be the best-intentioned politician in Washington. That said, when Mitt Romney rephrases his gaffs about those who accept help from government and brainstorms with Paul Ryan about the Heritage Foundation’s latest ideas about stiffening the backs of the elderly and the poor, remember: he and his friends will be speaking vicariously.

Mitt Romney’s “reasonable” debate performance?

Obama should be fired as a fact-checker. However, Mitt Romney’s performance in the first debate shouldn’t make it any easier to elect him president.

Campaign policy pronouncements, for political hustlers, used to be as cheap as paper to a typewriter. Today, they are what politicians say in the final debates of an election. Tailoring policy for a 90-minute audience with Americans, however, doesn’t change the underlying governing ambitions of today’s entire Republican leadership.

Romney’s inspired wordsmiths found the words, but misused them. “Trickle-down government” isn’t Obama’s alternative to “trickle-down economics." It’s the inescapable consequence of Republican determination to cut off Washington’s power to do any further good within American society. They’d reduce to a trickle any new money available for spending at home and would refer the supplicants to cash-starved states, churches, and engorged Chinese and American banks.

Obama’s apparent weak-debate performance will appear as nothing compared to the emasculated Washington macho that Republicans hope to leave as their legacy.

All Mitt Romney did Tuesday was give David Brooks and conservatives who can still talk to independents permission to call him a "Massachusetts moderate" for the duration of this election cycle.

Just short of being water-boarded, Romney blinked.

He shredded the craziest elements of his economic platform—the bits Bill Clinton could credibly destroy without using up any of his own fragile credibility. Most notable, he dropped his promise to cut income tax rates by 20% across the board and further cut the taxes of the rich. It had become impossible to talk in specifics about the nice stuff, while leaving all the nasty bits—the loopholes—up for negotiation with Congress.

Also, in a series of morning-after misstatements he’d carefully memorized, Romney appeared to shrug off the cruelest elements of his promise to repeal Obamacare.

First, Romney lied to multimillionaires about his lack of compassion for the other half of America. Then, on Tuesday, he lied to that other half as well.

(In the debate on October 16 on social policy, you can bet he’ll drop the most extreme Republican positions on immigration and other minority-group irritants.)

Nevertheless, just because Mitt Romney doesn’t appear to be trustworthy personally doesn’t mean the Republican Party he leads doesn’t offer a clear radical choice.

The fabulists in conservative think-tanks and Romney’s war room created a firewall of crazy stuff on tax cuts, religious freedom, welfare reform, socialized medicine, and America’s enfeebled place in the world, above all, to win the White House without having to compromise on their most important strategic concerns. Still intact, amazingly, is their determination to continue Bush’s tax cuts, across the board, and to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

These are the choices that make this election important.

Ingenious or not, if Romney wins in November, his utterances in Tuesday’s debate will give him absolutely no room as president to raise any new revenues. Democrat obstruction might save the Affordable Care Act—as a statute. However, they will not be able to properly fund it or growing pressures on Medicaid and other social and education programs for the other half.

Romney would carry on giving his 10% to the Mormon Church. However, he would oversee intolerable federal deficits and leave the vision of constructive government and the New Deal to New England and a few other affluent states mainly across the North.

Rice and Noonan’s brush with perfection

There’s a grace that seems to descend on intelligent women who’ve worked for Republican presidents. Condoleezza Rice was at George Bush’s side through each of his Middle East adventures, and Peggy Noonan wrote speeches for the sunny side of the Ronald Reagan presidency. Both are listened to respectfully, whether they abandon their critical faculties or not.

Here’s the conclusion of Rice’s speech to the Republicans in Tampa—a speech that many judged as the finest and wisest of the convention:

“Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have the experience and the integrity and the vision to lead us – they know who we are, what we want to be and what we offer the world.

That is why this is a moment – an election – of consequence. Because it just has to be – that the most compassionate and freest country on the face of the earth – will continue to be the most powerful!”

Here’s Peggy Noonan in her blog for the Wall St. Journal today, outlining what state of mind Mitt Romney should take to his first debate with Barack Obama:

“What Mitt Romney has to show is command, talent, resolve. He has to move with firmness, strength. Americans don’t really want someone they’d like to go out and have a beer with, they want someone who can help them afford a beer. First things first. Romney at this point should just forget likability—let’s just say he’s likable enough. He needs people to see certainty, guts, ability, and heft. Americans are tired of trying to like these guys, they want to respect them. They’d like to feel honest awe.”

Can you imagine Pat Buchanan or Dick Cheney imagining, let alone getting away with such complacent, romantic nonsense?

A black conservative academic may want America to be more compassionate, and any speechwriter for any president will want her words to suspend our disbelief and leave us in a state of awe. However, Rice and Noonan shouldn’t be able to utter such sugary platitudes about who Americans are and what Americans want in a president without being laughed at.

Maybe, it was only an awkward fleeting period in the emancipation of smart women. Let’s hope, however, that the next generation of powerful women who ride in the back seat with future presidents don’t come out of the experience as hero-worshippers and shameless flatterers.