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TV Movie:  Game Change

By no means great, I still kind of enjoyed it.  It was a total Sarah Palin hit job, I mean they really try to make her look bad.  But do they?  Among the things she is accused of not knowing:  What the Fed is; a single Supreme Court case; Who fought in World War 2; whether Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11.  These were the bad-dum-de-dum moments of the movie when we were supposed to be like "holy fucking shit, can you believe someone this stupid was almost the Vice President of the United States?"

But let's think about the assumptions underlying this premise.  Is a vital qualification of being President or Vice President the equivalent of scoring well on an AP Government test?  It would seem so -- after all everyone watching HBO and all the political operatives that populate the movie are just so-fucking-smart, I'm sure they all could beat Sarah Palin at trivial pursuit and if they studied really hard, could brush up on their American government knowledge.  So what happens when all these geniuses run the country?  Only the biggest recession since the Great Depression.  Only the 9/11 attacks.  Only the war in Iraq and going back a little further, the war in Vietnam.  The decade long war in Afghanistan with no clear victory in sight.  The Pakistani's making nuclear weapons and housing Bin Laden.  The North Koreans developing nukes.  The Iranians trying to.  Only the stock market turning into a massive pyramid scheme.  Only student loan debt crippling the next generation of young Americans.  Only the housing market bubble.  And all of this without a single internal rival, a single existential threat, and our economy and military being by far the biggest on the entire planet.

I think a lot of Americans are confused by things.  I think they think to themselves - I'm not the brightest person in the world, but it sure seems like these quick thinking fast talkers like Hillary Clinton and Lawrence Summers and Barack Obama, and all their ivy league folks with their AP test scores and advanced degrees - they really must know what they are doing.  They are the folks who ought to run the country.  And so they let them and then what happens?  All the connected people get rich and get a golden parachute when they screw up.  And all the stupid, public school, unconnected regular folks who just try to mind their own business and be good citizens and gets their kids through school and pay their mortgage get their 401ks ravaged, they can't afford college, they get stagnant wages at work, their send their kids to war, and so they get frustrated and think - maybe they're getting bamboozled.  They can't quite put their fingers on it, or how, but they see what clothes these people wear, how they talk about the world, and how their concerns don't seem to be the same.  These people don't spend their time memorizing who the President of Georgia is, or how the Fed's quantitative easing works, or the history of Ayman Al Zawahiri.  They know their saving accounts get no interest, they know Putin looks and acts like a thug, and they know some nutjobs from halfway across the world flew planes into the World Trade Center.

It doesn't surprise me someone like Palin holds a folksy appeal.  And look, I'm not defending her idiocy.  I'm not fan of idiots and I don't think she knows very much.  But I would like to point out, these other folks - the alternatives - the Hillary Clintons and Lawrence Summers and all these "the best and the brightest" -- they don't really know all that much either.  Sure, they know Marbury vs. Madison and Brown vs. the Board of Education.  They know the different between Arabs and Persians (maybe).  They might even know some interesting stuff in history about the Mexican-American war, or the how the Bank of the United States was formed, or details of Sherman's march through the South.  But they don't know as much as they'd like us all to think they know.  They don't know how to fix the economy.  They don't know how to win the wars we're in.  They don't know how to stop the crazies from getting nukes and they don't know how the middle class can be strong and confident again and where the jobs will come from.

And so where do they get this smug confidence?  Where do they get the presumption that they - and people with similar backgrounds to they - should be the ones to rule?  Where does it say the people who score the best on AP Tests are the best decision makers?  The most fair?  The most just?  The most wise?  Why is so supposed to be so pathetic that Palin manages to simply remember her lines for the debate - as opposed to memorizing the the different schools of thought in American foreign policy or memorizing entire dissenting opinions written by Felix Frankfurter?

As to the movie - Ed Harris was very good as John McCain.