I missed "Game Change" last night. How was it?

I no longer have HBO and doubt that I would have watched it. So far, it looks like no one else did either.

This just arrived from a discerning college buddy;

“Whatever your opinion of Palin, there is fabulous acting from the three main stars…Julianne Moore who channels Palin, Woody Harrelson and Ed Harris. Tonight and Monday nights HBO.”

It was scarier than I even thought. I gather they researched this pretty well. I thought the woman was ignorant, but I had no idea how ignorant she was.

The movie was prescient, too. If it had come out a week earlier, it would have looked like it was predicting the Rush Limbaugh fiasco. What it shows, thought, is that conservatives are far more morally bankrupt and poorly educated that we knew. It is so ironic that they present as a party of morality but in fact they are pure opportunists with not an ounce of moral fiber to them. Scary, scary, scary.

Now I see why she didn’t try to run again. She knows nothing and wasn’t interested in learning anything.

@Ron_C I certainly wouldn’t buy HBO just to watch it. I’m fortunate it comes with the cable package I have.

@gailcalled The job that Julianne More did “being” Palin was utterly amazing. I agree, the acting alone is reason to see it.

@wundayatta Sadly, I have to agree. Conservative ideology has its truths, but what it has become is pretty remote from conservatism and largely morally bankrupt.

@wundayatta I have not had the chance to see the movie yet, but I have read the book, and I hear that the movie takes some liberties. Now, the book definitely says she’s ignorant and knew very little, and that the McCain campaign knew almost nothing about her before taking her on (like, all the scandals), but the movie might be exaggerating.

@Aethelflaed I haven’t read the book yet, and plan to see the movie first, then read it. It will be interesting to see how far they vary. But in a brief dramatization, it is impossible not to take liberties with a book. There simply isn’t time to cover it all, and important events may have to be reduced down to distillations of what really happened.

They depict McCain as playing up the “Maverick” aspect. The main justification for choosing Palin is that they needed a “game changer” and so he took a wild gamble, because he’s a “risk taker.” Pretty scary. But I guess he knew he was going to lose anyway, so there was no down side and a possible upside.

That is a gambling mentality, and it’s a good thing he didn’t get elected President. I don’t know if he would have continued to act as a gambler as President—the office seems to change people a bit—but I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.

Republicans, in my opinion, are generally terribly irresponsible in terms of the policies they advocate and in the way they conduct themselves in office. I am amazed that they get elected. I guess there are a lot of Americans who approve of irresponsibility and risk taking behavior, simply, I guess, because it is risk taking and risk taking is seen as what build America.

I don’t believe that’s the case. I think people who built America may have taken risks, but they were generally calculated risks, not wild risks. McCain took a wild risk and that was not in the tradition of what built this county, I think.

I watched it – if you followed the campaign closely, there are very few surprises. I was curious to see how it would portray Meghan and Cindy McCain, but they didn’t get any lines in the film (which surprised me, given how mad Meghan McCain is about it).

I find Nicolle Wallace so interesting; she’s given some good interviews since the campaign, and I’d like to read her novel featuring a Palin character (writ as a mentally ill vice president). Her quote about the film is that it was “true enough to make her squirm”.

@wundayatta Indeed. My impressions match.

@dappled_leaves Yes, I listened to an interview this evening where Nicolle Wallace said just that. And Steve Schmidt has confirmed the accuracy of it as well. Further proof is in Sarah Palin’s condemnation of it. If she says it’s all lies, then it is definitely true.

For those who are interested, Rachel Maddow did an interview with Nicolle Wallace last night, but even better was Lawrence O’Donnell’s interview with Steve Schmidt.

@dappled_leaves Thanks for the links to those clips. I don’t watch pundit TV (or any TV), much, so I don’t know these characters and it was just as interesting to see the interviewers as the interviewees. It was nice to see both Steve and Nicole confirming their portrayals in the movie.

But I am a bit shocked about the lesson they said they learned. The lesson, they said, was not to put up an unvetted candidate. Well, I guess my lesson is that people should read more history. Because while I don’t remember exactly who it was—maybe Eagleton—but they had to unnominate him because they found he had mental illness issues.

The lesson back then was the same: candidates need careful vetting.

And these people knew it. They even mentioned in the movie how nervous it made them to take someone who wasn’t fully vetted.

That’s not the lesson of the movie. The lesson is about risk taking. McCain said he was a risk taker and he was going to take it because he knew he had to do something very risky in order to win. If he went with a vetted candidate, he wasn’t going to win. He knew it. Everyone knew it.

So he took a calculated risk, and now that the risk has failed, they are revisiting history and trying to reclaim McCain’s reputation. They are saying that it wasn’t his risktaking that was the problem. It was the lack of vetting. It’s a subtle difference, but very telling, I think. Maybe he is even trying to reclaim his reputation for a reason. What if we end up with a hung convention. Maybe they will need to turn to someone outside the current set of candidates. McCain is old, of course. But he’s proven in a presidential campaign. So maybe they are trying to reclaim him just in case. I don’t think it will go that way, but you always need to have contingency plans, just in case.

McCain made the choice, though. He took the risk. I think this damns his decision-making abilities. I think we need to be very careful not to let his former aids take the fall for his decision. To me, it looks like that is what is happening. His people are falling on their swords for him.

But McCain is a gambler. I’m not sure what happened to him during the time he was in the Vietnamese prisons, and I don’t know what his military upbringing did to him, but I suspect he has a “go for broke” attitude that comes out a bit too quickly. Maybe he pulled tricks like this in Vietnam and they worked. He survived. But he isn’t smart enough or patient enough to be commander-in-chief.

Steve Schmidt said at the end of his interview that he voted for McCain and that he thinks he has what it takes to be commander-in-chief. To me, that sounds like a campaign line. It sounds like a way of rehabilitating McCain’s decision-making ability. Rachel and Steve are very good looking and very well-spoken, and now they have cleverly placed themselves in the center—a place where they can get sympathy from left and right. Or at least left.

I don’t think this is going to happen, but if there’s trouble at the convention, look for McCain to be invited to be a candidate again. Look for them to get another centrist as a running mate. A vetted centrist. Look to see this movie as part of a very pragmatic effort to rehabilitate McCain’s reputation.

@wundayatta I’m not sure I agree with everything you’ve said here. I agree that risk-taking is not a quality I like to see in a leader, when a more reasoned approach is possible. However, the ability to make a swift decision in a crisis is an important one, and it doesn’t take much effort to spin “risk-taking” into that quality. In this situation, the risk the campaign took was to choose an unvetted candidate, or more specifically, the risk was to not vet the candidate. One of the points that was made in the film is that there are things they could have done – easy things, like send someone to Alaska to ask people about her – that they chose not to do because they wanted to believe she was the one.

I don’t think Schmidt is falling on his sword for McCain. I think he is taking responsibility for his own choices, and letting McCain avoid taking responsibility for his. In my opinion, McCain leaned far too heavily on his advisors during the campaign; there was a moment when you could feel he stopped being himself, and became what he needed to be in order to go for the win. After that, there were glimmers of his old sense of honour (e.g., talking to that crazy woman at the town hall meeting, and his concession speech), but not more than that. I think Schmidt knows there’s nothing to be gained from making accusations toward McCain and others, but is being honest about what he did, and knows now that he shouldn’t have. And I think McCain knows it’s politically easier to refuse to comment on any of it than to reopen the discussion – even though the honourable thing would be to admit that he made a terrible gamble that was dangerous for the country, and kept pursuing it even when he knew how wrong it was. I think Schmidt knows that people recognize this, and doesn’t see the need to push it.

McCain took his best shot, and sold the respect of most Americans in the process. He won’t try again.

@dappled_leaves Well, that’s the likely story. I think you are probably right. But if something weird happens at the convention, don’t forget you heard it here first!

Conspiracy theories abound.

@wundayatta Ok, you get the copyright. :)

@Jaxk Not a conspiracy. Contingency planning. But definitely verging on conspiracy. Still, if they’re going to make the movie, should we cooperate? And if we cooperate, what can we get out of it? It’s what I would do if I were a Republican strategist, and those guys are a lot smarter than I am. Not that that’s saying much, of course.

@wundayatta

We are no where near that desperate. I can think of a hundred candidates that would be better than McCain. He has already lost once to Obama. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over hoping for different results.

@Jaxk Very good point. Although… well, what do I know? I can’t begin to figure out how the Republican mind works. Still… how many Republicans have the name recognition of McCain? How many are war heroes? How many are moderates? How many are mavericks? Those are a lot of touch points to sell him and I think he has a great deal more stature than any of the other candidates. Plus a greater chance of appealing to moderates.

Well, if the convention gets all stuck, we’ll see.

@wundayatta

I can sympathize. I have no idea how to understand how the liberal mind works (or doesn’t). War Hero, Moderate, Maverick none of this worked for him last time nor do I think it is a selling point this time. Obama’s approval ratings are in the toilet and there needs to be a clear distinction between him and his opponent. I think most Republicans know this.

@Jaxk Is that so?

@dappled_leaves

In case you missed it

@Jaxk How fickle the polls. Who knows, if one week can drop one politician that far, why can’t McCain bounce back?

@ETpro One week? Both polls were conducted simultaneously.

If you listen to the right, we don’t have enough wars going, Obama is a Muslim whose approval rating is in the toilet, the only thing we can do to save the economy is to stop taxing business and make sure that only “the right” people vote. If you listen to Fox, Agamemnon has started and these are the last days. You can tell because a group of middle age virgins called Bishops are saying that the godless left is forcing abortions on good catholic girls.

Of course, none of the above is even close to the truth.

Then the more I hear Palin talk, the better I feel because truth is a complete stranger to her.

@ETpro

McCain don’t bounce too well.

@Ron_C

Finally, a post we can agree on. None of that is the truth.