Voters Probably Won’t Punish Democrats If They Act More Like Cary Grant And Harrison Ford
That’s politics for you!
Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report tweeted last week that he'd spoken with Democratic strategists who believed strong census numbers in New York offered them the chance to purge as many as five of the eight GOP seats in the state. Democrats could gerrymander the current 19D/8R map to a 23D/3R ass whooping.
Yet the question still remained whether Democrats would act so aggressively. Even though Democrats can count their House majority with the fingers on one hand, and partisan gerrymanders in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia alone could hand control to Republicans next year. Why would Democrats unilaterally disarm during what they openly describe as a battle for democracy itself? Well, it's important that Democrats always take the moral high road while Republicans leave skid marks on their backs. I heard the chump chorus on Twitter: "Can we agree gerrymandering is bad whoever is doing it?" and “While it would benefit my politics, we have to be against partisan gerrymandering even when it benefits us."
You wonder if these people have ever seen North by Northwest and The Fugitive .
In both those films, our hero is fucked, not just by the bad guys but by the system itself. In Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest , even the very white Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) understands that the police won't believe his crazy (though true) story and that he has to skip town and solve the mystery himself if he wants to clear his name. Modern Democrats would probably turn themselves in if they were starring in this film. Gotta show how much we trust institutions!
Based on the classic 1960s TV series, The Fugitive movie from 1993 starred Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble, who's wrongly convicted of murder. Kimble runs like hell once he has the chance to escape. He doesn't walk smiling into the gas chamber and talk about how he still believes in the system: "If I'd broken the law, I'd be no better than the one-armed man!"
Note that audiences would think characters who behaved as I jokingly suggest were chumps. They would stop watching. This is the problem when Kyrsten Sinema passionately defends the filibuster and Mitch McConnell pats her on the head for it. Audiences (and voters) don't like or respect chumps.
The villains in both fiction and real life often exploit the system, which is dispassionate but not necessarily moral. US Marshall Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) relentlessly pursues Kimble with no regard for his innocence or guilt. He only serves the system, so when Kimble famously cries, “I didn't kill my wife," Gerard coldly responds, “I don't care." Gerard later helps Kimble prove his innocence. That's a more satisfying conclusion than Gerard pulling a Joe Manchin and making pointless appeals to the the one-armed man's sense of fair play.
In N orth by Northwest , Thornhill commits several straight-up crimes: Stowing away on a train, evading the police, lying on the regular to obtain information, and at one point, stealing a stranger's car. The audience loves him. And at no point do they have trouble distinguishing him from the villain, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason).
Republicans are the Vandamm/one-armed man party. Democrats can still be Cary Grant and Harrison Ford if they don't act like chumps and realize that desperate times call for desperate measures. If you think nuking the filibuster to save voting rights would play with voters exactly the same as all the ways the GOP has abused the filibuster, then you must also think that audiences will boo Cary Grant when he steals some guy's car. I've seen the film multiple times in theaters. It's never happened yet.
It's maddening that so many Democrats believe playing constitutional hardball will somehow turn them into Republicans. Grant's Thornhill maintains his moral heroism in a key scene when he's informed that the government plans to willingly sacrifice its agent, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), and he delivers this show-stopping line:
If you fellows can't lick the VanDamm's of this world without asking girls like her to bed down with them and fly away with them and probably never come back, perhaps you ought to start learning how to lose a few cold wars.
Thornhill draws a clear, relatable line where he'll no longer permit the ends to justify the means. However, the Senate filibuster and gerrymandering aren't quite Eva Marie Saint's virtue. They aren't the laws against interstate flight when you're suspected of murder. They aren't even the crappy old car that Thornhill stole after the bad guys almost killed him with a crop duster.
Life isn't the movies, but politics is all about storytelling. Audiences and voters want to see heroes not chumps.
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You're not being a jerk. And yeah, poor young Archie had a rough go. And he made it all work for him in some high pressured circumstances. After all, I didn't call him Joseph Goebbels. I said he went full batshit crazy, later in life. All the way up to and including putting his young wife over his knee for a spanking and locking her in the occasional closet - this coming from Dyan Cannon, herself, not some anonymous source in a trash bio. And there's a fair bit of chatter about his LSD usage escaping the lab, so to speak, in the early 1960's.
Also, Mel Brooks, early fan and eventual studio lot neighbor, has some smashing anecdotes about his time with CG. They are well worth a listen.
You may be a professional bookseller, and I'll take your advice on biographies, but I was a film major in undergrad and then an actor and acting teacher all my professional life. I never met Cary Grant, but I know older people who circled the edges of his orbit toward the end. They would mostly agree with my assessment. Hell, they shaped it.
You know what to do dear woman.