Game Change

Note: Good ole Mercury retro played havoc with our radio interview on March 10. Dia finally recorded it – rather than doing it live – and posted it on You Tube. (This post was written before Merc went direct on March 17).

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Our daughter is a true movie aficionado. Mention a movie, an actor or actress, and she can recite verse and chapter and IMDB history. So whenever she comes home for a visit, we end up watching a lot of movies we have missed. One of these was Game Change, a 2012 film based on the book of the same name. It follows John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, from his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate to their ultimate defeat in the general election.

Julianne Moore plays Palin in this film and she looks so much like Palin, has her voice and mannerisms so perfected, that for a moment when she first appeared on screen, I thought she was Palin. Steve Schmidt, who was McCain’s main advisor during the file, is played by Woody Harrelson, one of those actors whose face you recognize, even if you can’t exactly place him in movies.

Harrelson is  terrific in everything he does and as Schmidt, now an MSNBC contributor (on the moderate Republican side), you understand exactly what he went through trying to educate Palin so that she would be up to snuff on interviews, with speeches, in the public. Ed Harris, who needs no intro,  plays a bewildered McCain who wanted to “do something daring,” something that fit his image as a maverick.

So when his advisors suggested Palin as a running mate, an obscure governor from Alaska who was good-looking and went against party politics on her stance about oil companies and Alaska drilling, McCain followed their advice. The film is interspersed with actual news clips. There’s the famous  Palin/Couric interview, where it’s obvious that Palin’s foreign policy experience rests on her claim that she can see  Russia from her front porch. We also see clips of the VP debate between Biden and Palin.

I came away from this film feeling sort of sorry for Palin,  who apparently didn’t understand the kind of maelstrom into which she would be drawn. But what I felt most of all was gratitude that the McCain/Palin ticket didn’t win. To me, it seems like one of those alternate offshoots of history, that maybe there is a place where these two won and, well, no telling what sort of horrors might be occurring there now.

I mean, really. McCain as prez – we’d be at war with any country who didn’t agree with us on every talking point, and Palin would be urging all of us to retire in Alaska. I’m so deeply grateful that era is over. That’s what I brought away from this movie. That and an appreciation for superb acting and a respect for that adage about how if you don’t grasp your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

Yuck.