THE best story about what can happen when a politician tries to flatter the masses comes from England, but fittingly enough the politician was American-born Lady Nancy Astor. Standing for Parliament during a period of personal unhappiness, she visited a women’s prison and told the detainees: “You’re luckier than I am; you’re wanted and I’m not.”
The season of “the real people” is upon us, and if the rest of Campaign ’96 is anything like the shirt contest we’ve already seen, Oliver Stone will be forced to quit the movie business and find other work. Not that Campaign ’96 won’t inspire movies; merely that it won’t inspire the wordy, three-hour character studies that Stone likes to make. Conservative politicians are courting the Common Man with such unshaded artlessness that we will have to regress to the silent era and make two-reelers with titles like “The Pickup Truck,” “The Gun Show,” and “The Tractor Pull,” starring Buster Keaton as a beset Republican candidate desperately trying to cultivate a populist image.
Comments