HBO's Game Change Hits, But Sarah Palin Pic Misses Religion

[rug]

March 11, 2012
By Anthea Butler

Sarah Palin’s endless political reality show continued this past weekend with the airing of HBO’s Game Change, which focuses on McCain’s choice of Palin as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election. Since 2008, Palin has been in the news, either for making asinine statements, or for her many attempts to capture the hearts and minds of the Fox viewing public. Her latest screed linking President Obama to pre-Civil War slave owners speaks volumes about what she has learned, which is not much.

Based on John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s 2010 book, Game Change the film reveals what no one else apparently has the chutzpah to say: that Sarah Palin was the opening salvo in the the dissolution and destruction of the Republican Party, which is now on painful display in the 2012 election season. McCain’s choice opened the door to the teeming masses of lower and middle class Republicans who believed in Sarah Palin, rather than party politics.

Those masses were given form in the Tea Party, essentially resulting in a takeover of the GOP by the very groups it hoped to exploit for votes: evangelicals, tea partiers, and birthers. Today’s candidates have each taken a page from Palin’s playbook, from prayer rallies to makeovers, while Rick Santorum has even bested the former governor by recounting the story of bringing his dead baby home so the family could grieve. Instead of moving into the 21st century, its political gaffes have sent the Republican Party back to the Dark Ages.

What Game Change Misses

It was John McCain’s inability to connect with the religious right, and the need to one-up the historic moment of an African-American presidential nominee, that got the ball rolling. Clearly in need of a conservative Christian on the ticket, and not being the favorite of evangelicals like James Dobson for his previous stances on social issues, McCain decided to tack towards Pentecostals, gaining endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley. Those short-lived fiascoes left him in search of endorsements from prominent Christians.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/5778/game_change_hits,_but_misses_religion_in_choice_of_sarah_palin_for_vp

[dipsydoodle]

1. Game Change's gift of an improbable dignity to Sarah Palin

Game Change, the book, was an example of campaign journalism at its most crass: an inelegant hodge-podge of rumors and supposition threaded together with a thesaurus and gall. Game Change, the movie, is an example of what happens when you remove the journalists from journalism: you get a story.

A pretty good one, in fact. By choosing to focus on the psychodrama behind and following John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, the makers of the movie picked out the 2008's second most compelling narrative (the major one having something to do the history of race in America, whatever) – but by far its most intimate one. Not many people can really identify with the story of a man attempting to fulfill the destiny of an entire people; almost everyone has a story about a blind date gone terribly, terribly wrong.

By nature, the movie had to excise a lot of the clunky writing and ham-fisted exposition that weighed down the airy hypothetical conversations that made Game Change a bestseller. The private meetings where Palin supposedly revealed the depths of her ignorance – wanting to negotiate England's Iraq policy with the Queen, not knowing why there is a North and South Korea – are thinly sourced, at best; but in the context of hindsight and in the hands of skilled actors, they ring frighteningly true.

Liberal viewers will, undoubtedly, find great satisfaction in seeing these scenes performed, especially given the eerily spot-on performances of the cast. The movie's producers went to completely unnecessary lengths, in some cases, to make the scenes appear, at least, to be documentary – even the bit-part actors are dopplegangers for their characters, and they attended to details such as McCain's preference in liquor or the look of the campaign's office.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/11/hbo-game-change-sarah-palin?newsfeed=true

Found that rooting around to see when it will be shown here in the UK.

[rug]

5. Do you often get HBO programs in the UK?

[dipsydoodle]

6. They're shown on Sky Atlantic

so I'm guessingit will show up there most ilkely.

off topic - I've ordered one of those 3" high detachable double round collars like Nucky wears in Boardwalk Empire having finally tracked them down after looking on and off for about 50 years.

[rug]

7. Lol!

Thanks for the image.

[TlalocW]

2. McCain choosing Palin got me pissed at him right from the start

And not just because she's a flaming idiot because we really didn't know that at the beginning, and there were some signs of worry that he had indeed one-upped Obama. No it was because his doing so told us he believed women would vote based primarily on with whom they shared the same kind of sex organs. Who could believe after all that electorate segment comprised of females actually cared about the issues. No, they just wanted one of their own to reach the second highest office in the land.

TlalocW

[Jim__]

3. I agree that the movie down-played the religious angle.

Based on what I was reading at the time she was picked, she was the choice of the religious right. The movie makes it look like Steve Schmidt picked based on internet research.

But there were other things about Palin that I didn't know, things that made the choice even more asinine than we already knew it was. The movie implies that she did not know what the Fed was. It also shows her completely shutting down, essentially going catatonic, when under pressure to master complex situations - e.g. prior to the interview with Katie Couric and at the beginning of her prep for the debate with Biden. A president cannot behave that way. In the most critical situations, the president is under extreme pressure, and he has to be at the peak of his performance. On top of all her other failings, Palin could not perform under the pressures of the presidency.

McCain has to be a complete ass to have picked her.

[CJCRANE]

4. "The movie makes it look like Steve Schmidt picked based on internet research".

IIRC there was a post on DU about a week before the announcement which suggested Palin would be the perfect Repub VP choice.

I always wondered if that was someone from the campaign testing the waters..or maybe Schmidt read that post on DU and that's where he got the idea...

OK it's a long shot but...