The anti-democratic strain of political films

I just finished watching and discussing Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) with my students today. Man, what a rich film. It really captures machine politics so much better than just about any other film I've seen. What really caught me was this quote from Sen. Paine, as he's explaining to Smith the harsh realities of political life:

I compromised—yes. So that all those years, I could sit in that Senate and serve the people in a thousand honest ways…. I've served our state well, haven't I? We have the lowest unemployment and the highest federal grants. But, well, I've had to compromise, had to play ball. You can't count on people voting, half the time they don't vote, anyway. That's how states and empires have been built since time began.

Doesn't that just nail it? Bosses don't need to control their politicians all or even most of the time. Machine politicians are free to represent their constituents on all but just a few key bills, and then they have to do as they're told. And the machine politicians can rationalize it because, most of the time, they're giving the people what they want, even though they're counting on people not to notice the graft they're enabling. Man, I spent four years figuring this out during my dissertation research. I should have just watched this movie.

Okay, so that's great. But I couldn't help noticing that Sen. Smith was basically the one honest guy in the Senate, and, not coincidentally, he was the only one that hadn't been elected. Apparently, the electoral system taints anyone who goes through it. I noticed the same thing in The Candidate (1972), which I'm showing my students next week. In that one, McKay starts out as a passionate, liberal anti-poverty lawyer. Then he runs for office and is told to stifle his true passions. By the time he wins, he has no idea what he stands for. Elections have ruined a decent man.

And isn't it the same thing with Dave (1993)? In that one, a cynical president who has worked his way up the political chain to the highest office in the land is struck down by illness and is replaced by a guy who looks just like him but, thanks to his lack of electoral experience, isn't jaded. So basically you just get a de-electorized version of the same president, and it turns out he's much better.

Look, I recognize that there's plenty in elections to be cynical about. But it really annoys me when filmmakers - and political pundits - speak about elections as though they were a distraction from good government instead of the cause of it. We heard that from the Baker-Hamilton commission last year when they insisted on releasing their Iraq report after the 2006 elections so as not to inject politics into it, as though the war weren't the crucial issue in the elections.

Jacobs and Shapiro summed it up best in their book Politicians Don't Pander:

Why has the derogatory term "pander" been pinned on politicians who respond to public opinion? The answer is revealing: the term is deliberately deployed by politicians, pundits, and other elites to belittle government responsiveness to public opinion and reflects a long-standing fear, uneasiness, and hostility among elites toward popular consent and influence over the affairs of government.

Word.

This can't be right

From Giglio's Reel Politicians (1995, p. 130), which I've assigned to my students:

While much of the action in the film [No Way Out] takes place inside the Pentagon, the audience receives virtually no information about this octagonal building or the workings of the defense department....

Octagonal building?

Historical precedents for the 2008 election

Actually, there aren't that many. What are the odds that the incumbent party will hold onto the White House when its deeply unpopular incumbent isn't on the ticket? The two main precedents that jump to mind are 1952 and 1968. In both examples, however, the president declined to run for an additional term, largely because he realized he would have lost. (Bush isn't running next year because he's termed out.) But both examples include presidents who served more than one term (Truman took over when FDR died; LBJ took over when JFK was shot) and had started - and failed to end - unpopular wars. And even though the incumbents weren't on the ticket, their party still lost the presidential election. Possibly, 1920 could fall into this category. WWI was over, of course, and we don't have reliable numbers on Wilson's popularity, but it seems safe to assume that the League of Nations fight and his stroke took a toll on his approval ratings. And his party lost in the election, as well.

The Republicans will, of course, be in this same situation next November. I'm guessing the Republican nominee will eventually try to distance himself from the war, but none of the frontrunners have remotely done that yet. Quite the contrary. So the Republicans will be at a real disadvantage. That doesn't guarantee a Democratic victory. Remember that the Republican victories in 1952 and 1968 were hardly blowouts. But the wind is against the Republicans.

No, seriously...

Thanks to the wild success of the surge, we'll be able to pull out the 30,000 surge troops by next summer. So, in July of 2008, after a year and a half of surging, we'll be exactly where we were in January of 2007. How does this help anything?

Everything helps Bush

NY Times Headline:

Departures Offer Chance for a Fresh Start as Term Ebbs

Oh, yes, the fact that Bush finally lanced a boil a good six months after everyone told him to and years after the boil did immeasurable damage to the Constitution and the office of the AG just has to be good news for the administration. And, of course, if Gonzales hadn't left, it would have been good news, too, because it would have highlighted Bush's profound sense of loyalty. And conveniently, the article's second paragraph compares Bush to Reagan.

Come off it already. I'm tired of reading about how the lack of terror attacks is good for Bush, but a new terror attack would be good for Bush, and how Democratic obstruction is good for Bush, but Democratic complaince would be good for Bush. As a brief look at Bush's approval rating shows, very little has been good for Bush in the past six years.

A modicum of pity for Sen. Craig

Okay, let's just stipulate that there's an overwhelming feeling of schadenfreude when a "family values" Republican officeholder is outed as gay. He's a hypocrite. He rose to power by criticizing the same behavior he apparently practices in secret. Shame on him.

That said, he could've beat this rap. So far, Matt Yglesias is the only one I've seen pointing out that the arrest report doesn't really describe much criminal behavior. It's all contextual. Tapping one's foot beneath a bathroom stall surely isn't a crime in Minnesota except in the context of requesting lewd behavior, and that requires proof of intent. I can understand that Craig probably didn't want to fight this in court, so he figured he could end it quickly with a guilty plea. Shows what he knows.

But beyond the bad legal approach and the hypocrisy, what we have here is a guy who, as part of his job, spends a lot of time in airports. And, when he's bored and alone, he happens to like the occasional anonymous gay sex. That doesn't really turn me on, but why is that a crime?

I mean, here's a conservative guy growing up in a conservative state. And in order to pursue the career he wanted (indeed, in order to stay alive, in many cases), he had to deny his true self. And as we increasingly see from the likes of Ted Haggard and others, you can only do that for so long. The itch just has to be scratched eventually.

It's sad. And surprisingly common.

Early U.S. Party System

If you can track it down, I encourage you to read The History of Legislative Methods in the Period Before 1825 by Ralph Harlow (Yale University Press, 1917). This is a fascinating book about the growth of legislative political parties in the colonies and early U.S. Congress.

In Party Government (1942), Schattschneider goes out of his way to criticize James Madison's Federalist 10. Madison, of course, was warning us about the dangers of faction, and was apparently oblivious to the necessity of parties in running a democracy. Schattschneider claims that Madison couldn't have known how important parties were to democracies because neither Madison nor anyone else alive at that time had ever seen a real functioning representative democracy.

Harlow shows that Schattschneider's claim is bunk. The pre-revolutionary colonial legislatures had evolved party systems (called "Juntos") to counter the power of the colonial governors, who were usually picked by the king of England. In many of the colonies, the Junto was as powerful or even more powerful than the governor.

One of my favorite examples came from Massachusetts. In 1766, the governor urged the statehouse to investigate the recent riots over the Stamp Act and find out who was responsible. The statehouse, under the control of the Boston Junto of brewer/patriot Sam Adams, John Hancock, and others, appointed five investigators from outside Boston who knew nothing of the city, of committee work, or of the riots. Thus did the legislature follow the governor's orders while producing exactly the results it wanted - none of the riot's perpetrators were brought to justice.

While I usually don't get into books on committees, Harlow's examination of the growth of committees as an arm of legislative parties is really quite interesting. If you're remotely interested in parties or early U.S. governmental history, this is a great book for you.