The White House is going thespian, says DONALD CLARKE
IT’S ALL about actors becoming President this week. Michael Moore has suggested that Matt Damon should run for the top office in the US. A Facebook site urging Martin Sheen to stand as our own head of state has received a significant number of sign-ups. Hang on. . . you generally need three of these stories to generate a column. Screenwriter demands that Jennifer Aniston – she’s of Hellenic descent, you know – stand for the Presidency of Greece. Good grief. It really is all about actors becoming President this week.
Aniston, Sheen, Damon: the liberal thespians are taking over. Before long, we’ll all be forced into gay marriages and prohibited from innocently discharging assault rifles in crowed shopping malls.
There’s more. It seems that Alec Baldwin, a vegetarian leftist, is considering a run for the mayor of New York. Hollywood is set to save America from the Tea Party. Hooray!
Maybe not. The US has always shown a reluctance to elect liberal actors to office. There’s no doubt the Dream Factory demographic skews towards the left – you don’t often see Oscar-winners taking up podium time to complain about the heavy burden of taxation on the rich or the worrying advance of positive discrimination – yet conservative entertainers have fared far better at the polls than their liberal counterparts.
Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California. Clint Eastwood was mayor of Carmel. Sonny Bono got elected to the House of Representatives. And, of course, a modestly gifted film actor actually became President three decades ago.
It's hard to think of a single liberal who has achieved anything like this success. A trawl round the internet tells us that some Democrat named Stephen Peace served as state senator in California. Mr Peace's most famous performances were in the esteemed Attack of the Killer Tomatoesseries.
Ben Jones, the bloke who played Cooter Davenport in The Dukes of Hazzard, served as a congressman. Helen Gahagan, "She" in the 1935 version of H Rider Haggard's titular novel, was a greatly admired congresswoman.
It’s not a particularly stellar line-up. Say what you like about Ronald Reagan, but he was a real movie star. Schwarzenegger saved the planet. Clint Eastwood (a non-aligned conservative) is Clint Eastwood.
What’s going on? Well, at the risk of annoying our conservative readers, the right has always favoured bold symbols that tell simple stories. Soft-liberal voters are much more at home with nuance and shades of grey. In the unlikely event Damon takes up Moore’s invitation, he will find that only one of his roles can be repackaged as an easily summarised political icon. An amnesiac killing-machine who exhibits only faint whispers of emotion? He might want to think of joining the Republican Party.
