The Obamamometer

April 14, 2008, 7:25 a.m.

The perfect candidate breaks from script.

By David Kahane

You know how people talk in this town. Everybody's on a first-name

basis with Brad and Angelina, especially if they've never met them;

everyone takes credit for a movie's success even if he was the exec

who passed on the project before that final rewrite turned it into a

hit and got him fired; and everybody thinks that his or her opinion

about presidential politics really matters. "What I do know?" an

executive once sighed to me. "I couldn't even get my candidate

elected."

So the other day, I was having lunch on the patio at Orso's with a

fellow screenwriter, and as we watched all the suits making deals that

didn't include us, all the actresses who aren't going to be in our

movies, and all the agents who won't return our phone calls, this

writer leaned over to me and whispered, "Have you heard about the

Obamamometer?"

I won't keep you in suspense. Turns out that this writer knows someone

who knows someone who knows someone who went to Harvard Law with B.

Hussein Obama Jr., and, the story goes, such was Barry's monumental

capacity for sucking up to his professors that the "Obamamometer" was

established to calibrate and quantify the most egregious, shameless

brown-nosing, and it quickly became the gold standard of Uriah Heep-

dom in Cambridge, Mass. "That was a 10 on the Obamamometer," the

Harvard men and women would whisper when someone rose to the unctuous

level of Barry at his best. Who knows, maybe they still do.

I laughed in my friend's face -- "you expect me to believe that?" I

cried. After all, if you wanted to invent the ideal candidate for a

post-9/11 world, you couldn't do much better than Obama: his parents'

brave interracial marriage, their tragically broken home, the early

years experiencing religious and cultural diversity in Indonesia, then

on to a fancy private prep school in Hawaii, Harvard Law, and, for

good measure, a dollop of good old-fashioned Chicago machine/ward-

heeler bare-knuckled politics. No wonder a first-term senator with no

particular qualifications or accomplishments realized that he could

run for president!

But my friend had even more surprises in store for me. It seems that

at Harvard our Barry was widely regarded as a person of overweening

arrogance and a gold-plated sense of entitlement; not only did the

world owe him a living, it owed him just about everything. I was so

upset I made my buddy pick up the check for our two salads, a shared

carpaccio, and designer waters, since he's working at the moment and

I'm not.

Then along came San Francisco. Always eager to display his common

touch, Barry tootled up the hill to the modest Pacific Heights shack

of one of the sons of J. Paul Getty, said something that everybody on

our side knows is plainly true and -- whoops! -- you'd have thought he'd

just rolled another gutter ball while pretending to bowl in

McKeesport, or something.

Speaking of the folks in flyover country, he said: "You go into these

small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the

Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's

replaced them . . . it's not surprising then they get bitter, they

cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them

or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to

explain their frustrations."

What's wrong with that? Not that I personally know anybody in flyover

country; as the movie mogul, Jack Lipnik, says to the eponymous Barton

Fink in the Coen brothers' best movie: "I'm from New York myself --

well, Minsk if you wanna go way back." But out here in Hollywood,

we've had their number for years. In fact, we love making movies about

them: beetle-browed, Bible-thumping hillbillies who sleep with their

guns and their sisters. Chronically unemployed superstitious

malcontents, helplessly buffeted by the winds of change or the

Chinese, whichever comes first. Racist losers. You know, like the

local yokels who made poor Ned Beatty squeal like pig in Deliverance

before Burt Reynolds put an arrow through one of them. We liberals are

just trying to help.

But maybe Barry's private remarks didn't come off as helpful. (Have

they tracked down the Bushitler operative who recorded his chat and

leaked it to Arianna yet? Where's Alberto Gonzales when we need him?)

Maybe they really did sound arrogant, aloof, and condescending --

quintessentially Harvard, as it were. Hey, give the guy a break: One

of the hardest things about being a liberal Democrat is that, when

you're talking to the resentful yahoos whose votes you unfortunately

need, you have to pretend to care about them. When you're trying to

sell Hope and Change, you need to give the rubes Hope that the Change

is going to be Change they want. Even when you know there's no Hope of

that.

Just ask Mrs. Obama. Quoth Michelle: "Barack Obama will require you to

work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put

down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you

move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better.

And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your

lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

You hear that, people -- we're talking to you!

So I guess now the cat's out of the carpetbag. But you know what? It

won't matter. Hillary can show up in St. Patrick's Cathedral with the

New Testament in one hand and an Uzi in the other and it still won't

help her. We have the media -- half of whom went to Harvard themselves

-- on our side. We have Hope and Change. We have Bush. We have the

Obamamometer, on which our guy always scores a glorious, perfect 10.

This time, we can't lose. Can we?

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-- David Kahane is the nom de cyber of a Hollywood screenwriter. You

can write to him at kahanenro@gmail.com. Just don't ask him to read

your scripts.

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-C-