Seth watches rom-tragi-coms so you don't have to

My wife and I watched "Love and Other Drugs" last night. It was mainly her idea, although she ended up hating it far more than I did. Here is my quick summary: "Love and Other Drugs" is to "Jerry Maguire" as "The Story of Us" is to "When Harry Met Sally."

Okay, I will explain. With another analogy. At its best, "Love" is to pharmaceutical representatives what "Maguire" was to sports agents. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jamie, a drug rep working his way up through the Pfizer corporation. The film gives us a slightly insidery view of the cozy and weird relationship between drug reps and doctors -- how drug reps visit doctors' offices constantly and hand out company umbrellas and pens and lunches and vacation packages so that the doctors will give out drug samples to their patients. It's stuff you basically know is going on but is rarely shown in a mainstream film. And as far as that goes, it's great. Gyllenhaal is funny, charismatic, oversexed, etc.

And then, like Jerry Maguire, he has an epiphany. This time, the epiphany is love; he's hopelessly enamored of Anne Hathaway's character Maggie, a patient who's in the early stages of Parkinson's disease. The irony is clear: here's a guy who can easily obtain basically any girl and any miracle cure he wants, but he's in love with a woman with an incurable disease.

So the film kind of has three main plots running through it: Gyllenhaal's rise within big pharma, his cute-but-increasingly-tragic relationship with Hathaway, and a comic relief plot involving Josh Gad, who play's Gyllenhaal's brother. Each of these plots would make a decent short film, but they don't really complement each other particularly well here. The comic relief plot, while genuinely funny, just seems less and less connected with the rest of the film as it becomes more emotional.

This is where the film reminds me of "The Story of Us," where you had a solid cast dealing with actual human drama, but the comic relief, while very funny, seemed completely unrelated to the main plot. Basically, it failed where "Harry Met Sally" succeeded. It's like watching "Casablanca," but the satellite channel keeps switching over to "Duck Soup" every few minutes.

Meanwhile, the romantic plot just gets heavier, especially when Gyllehaal gets some jarring advice from an older man who's been married to a Parkinson's victim for 25 years. The film is really hitting on a serious concept here, and it's almost like the writers and the cast just didn't want to deal with it head on.

Anyway, not totally successful, but enjoyable enough in parts. And I do appreciate that Gyllenhaal is cast as a romantic lead with a hairy chest.

Update: Andrew Therriault nails the film as a 90s period piece starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Ethan Hawke.

How legislators talk

Here's a lovely letter from Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald to Democratic Senator Mark Miller, the minority leader, currently hiding somewhere in Illinois. An excerpt:

Your grasp of reality, and control of your caucus as minority leader, continues to amaze me.... Your stubbornness in trying to ignore the last election and protect the broken status quo is truly shameful. While we wait for you and your colleagues to finally show up, Senate Republicans continue to stand ready to do the job we were elected to do, here in Wisconsin. I hope you are enjoying your vacation, and your vacation from reality.

For the record, concerns about incivility among elected officials tend to be way overblown. Even if legislators don't like each other, they have longstanding rules and customs that allow them to address the people's business and make decisions about competing interests. I think it's fair to say that those rules are under considerable strain in Wisconsin right now.

(h/t Barry Burden)

Does shamelessness have a price?

Jonathan Bernstein doubts that movement conservatives are winning just because they're so adept at repeating talking points without shame.

When pundits can pick up and drop arguments at the drop of the hat without worrying about long-term consistency, it may make it easier to appear to be winning at any moment, but at the cost of actually fighting for policies they believe in. I don't know; perhaps most of this stuff is only surface-deep and doesn't really have any effect beyond really efficiently conveying to people disposed to agree with conservatives what it is that they're suppose to agree with right now. But the idea that it's a major net plus for conservatives, I think, is unproven and highly unlikely.

I think there are other prices to these stances, which are partially attributable to what has been termed "epistemic closure." Just a few years ago, Republicans would happily criticize teachers' unions but were always very quick to profess their love for the teachers themselves. No more. Now, conservative pundits are regularly going on Fox to demonize teachers and talking about how lavish a $50,000 salary (plus benefits!) is for someone who doesn't work summers. Yes, many of these same pundits also pointed out quite recently how tragically low a $250,000 salary was for Wall Street CEOs (and they didn't mention the benefits then), but hypocrisy isn't really the point here.

The point is that when conservative pundits go on conservative news outlets and bash teachers, conservative viewers get the impression that it's okay to make these arguments publicly. And politically, that's a really dumb idea. Teachers are incredibly popular. What's more, there are a lot of them, and they don't all live in liberal neighborhoods and they aren't all Democrats. Conservatives are alienating a large and very sympathetic constituency when they make these sorts of arguments, and if all they watch is Fox, they probably don't even know it.

No-fly zone

Marc Herman sent me this video of a remarkably sane and intelligent John McCain being interviewed by David Frost on Al Jazeera(!) and making the case for a no-fly zone over Libya:

McCain's logic is that Libya could very well be the next Rwanda or Srebrenica -- and if it is, we really want to be non-neutral and on the right side of it. And yes, that's true, although unfortunately we don't have the luxury of knowing what the next Rwanda or Srebrenica is before it happens. Still, while creating a no-fly zone over Libya is a far cry from deploying 100,000 soldiers onto Libya's beaches, it's nonetheless an engagement. Robert Farley says it nicely:

Any decision to intervene means, effectively, that we have decided on regime change in Libya. This is to say that we’ve decided the rebels should win, and we’re willing to undertake steps that will make it easier for them to do so.

In other words, it would be very easy (and accurate) for Khaddafi to portray the struggle as one between him and the United States. I can't help thinking that that would make it easier, rather than harder, for him to retain his position of power. I get that not a lot of people like him, but a lot of people who don't like him hate us even more.

The usual caveats apply here: I'm no expert on foreign policy or on Libyan politics. Weight my views accordingly.

I can see it in your smile

Via.

Propaganda

My wife pointed me to this propaganda poster from World War I. It was printed by the United States Food Administration and written entirely in Yiddish.

I'm sure there were plenty of folks at the time who objected to government money being used to print documents in a language other than English. Of course, the poster minces no words in telling Yiddish speakers their responsibilities. Here's the translation:

Food will win the war. You came here seeking freedom, now you must help to preserve it. Wheat is needed for the allies. Waste nothing.

Comparing politicians and their districts

Are elected officials good representatives of their districts? That's actually a difficult question for political scientists to answer, in part because our measures are poor. We have plenty of good measures of the partisanship of elected officials, most of them deriving from roll call votes. We also have good measures of the partisanship of voters, most of them deriving from surveys and election results. But directly comparing voters and politicians is hard when we don't have a common scale.

Hans Noel and I try to remedy this in a new article (gated or ungated, PDF) in Political Research Quarterly. Our approach is to examine votes on legislative referenda in California. That's when state legislators vote on a bill and then send the exact same text onto the voters -- it's one of the only times that voters and politicians are voting on precisely the same thing. We use these referenda votes as "bridges" between legislators and their districts. Then we can put legislators' roll call votes and districts' votes on initiatives onto the same scale and generate comparable ideal points for districts and legislators.

How do they look? Well, it looks like legislators are a lot more polarized than their districts. There are actually plenty of moderate Assembly districts in California; there are basically no moderate Assembly members. Virtually every Democrat in the Assembly is more liberal than her district; virtually every Republican member is more conservative than her district.

We also find that members of the majority party tend to deviate further from their districts than members of the minority party do. Time out of office, we suggest, causes the minority party to try to moderate to win back the majority.