Politics: Allen for President!
Fund, John H.
"Politics: Allen for President!" JOHN H. FUND Alen for President! WOMEN TAKING CHARGE IS IN. Conservative Angela Merkel has become Germany's first female leader. Political pundits endlessly speculate about a possible...
...Lurie acknowledges that his NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43...
...John H. Fund, The American Spectator's Politics columnist, is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...In fact, one of the top writers for the show is Steve Cohen, who once served as Hillary's deputy communications director in the Clinton White House...
...He is quick to point out that Geena Davis's character won't be a Democrat...
...All good reasons for the buzz about ABC's new series Commander in Chief which stars Academy Award-winner Geena Davis as Mackenzie Allen, a vice president who takes over the Oval Office upon the death of the incumbent...
...The vice president's staff is appalled...
...President Davis threatens Nigeria with military intervention, but only to save a woman condemned to death for committing adultery...
...For balance, the new president will supposedly hold a few conservative views, according to Lurie, though abstinence education is a position that even Hillary Clinton has avidly embraced...
...To my mind, it will likely remind any non-liberals who tune in exactly what they didn't like about the last Democratic administration...
...Every week, our heroine president 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 JOHN H FUND will be up against a reactionary Speaker and his "Ann Coulter-like" chief aide who scheme against her like Boris and Natasha in the old Bullwinkle cartoon...
...The fireworks begin in the first episode when the conservative Republican president suffers a stroke and on his deathbed asks Vice President Allen to step down so that the malevolently conservative House Speaker Nathan Templeton (Donald Sutherland) can take over and continue his policies...
...In the end, it turns out she wasn't part of the orgy, which makes her appear all the more virtuous...
...The sets are realistic, the acting solid, and because the plot lines involve fewer Oval Office meetings and more scenes in the family quarters it will be accessible to a wider range of viewers than NBC's The West Wing...
...Lurie's attempts to stuff his show with liberal pabulum may have already earned him a comeuppance...
...To that end, he has evengasp!—hired some conservative writers...
...Changes can't come too soon...
...Nonetheless, Lurie insists audiences will have some Democrats to hiss at...
...Stuart Stevens, a GOP political consultant, has offered assurances that Lurie is no knee-jerk liberal: "He was born in Israel, went to West Point and is tough-minded," he says...
...Mackenzie Allen may pass for conservative in his imagination, but everyone else I've talked to thinks she is a Hillary Clinton shorn of only some of her liberalism...
...Katherine Harris, one of the few Republicans to attend the show's premiere in Washington...
...At one point he descends into comic evil by telling the vice president that her desire to use the Oval Office to do good in the world is naive...
...Political pundits endlessly speculate about a possible Hillary Clinton vs...
...In an obvious nod to how liberals wished Bill Clinton had fought back during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Senator Hanson refuses as a point of principle even to discuss the charge, saying it's an is-sue of privacy...
...Condi Rice match-up in 2008...
...The film was released by Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks studio only three weeks before the 2000 election and is a parody of the warped worldview of liberals...
...One says that the Speaker would "bring back book burning, creationism in the classroom and invading every Third World country...
...Polls show three-quarters of Americans are ready to vote for a female president...
...Series creator Rod Lurie, a self-described feminist, says the show has an upbeat "You Go, Girl...
...This is softening up the country for Hillary," concluded Rep...
...Mackenzie was a centrist conservative, a Republican, but she didn't like party politics," Lurie explains...
...Douglas Urbanski, Oldham's manager, said the people be-hind the project couldn't deal "with a Republican character...
...In an October surprise, Lurie was replaced as daily boss of the show by Steven Bochco—the creator of NYPD Blue...
...I have a daughter who'd rather see Pat Buchanan in the Oval Office than her old lady," President Allen laments...
...The reason you want to be president is because you want the power, you want the power to control the universe...
...Instead, she will play an independent...
...She agrees to meet with Templeton who proceeds to make sexist comments about menopause and that this "is not the time for social advances...
...theme, and it does have a lot going for it...
...The president's own daughter is a female version of TV's Alex Keaton, a conservative young fogy...
...show is a direct descendant of his 2000 political thriller The Contender, which starred Joan Allen as a Democratic senator who is targeted by conservatives during her confirmation hearings after she is nominated to become vice president...
...While Lurie will still be active with the series, it may now bear less resemblance to an infomercial for a Hillary Clinton presidential run...
...The confirmation controversy revolves around allegations lodged against Senator Laine Hanson bya fellow senator, a McCarthyite brute played by Gary Oldham, that she had engaged in a sex orgy back in college...
...A sexist presidential candidate named Teddy Roosevelt Bridges, reluctantly acknowledging his unpopularity with female voters, puts her on a Republican ticket in a bid to attract diversity supporters...
...But in enticing viewers Lurie is trying too hard by promising that he won't be hijacking the show's plot-lines to score points for his liberal worldview...
...He said that when he agreed to do the film, the character he portrayed, Senator Sheldon Runyon, was sold as a well-meaning albeit flawed figure...
...That may be an overstatement...
...Having seen the first few episodes, I remain skeptical...
...who is at all sympathetic...
...POLITICS J O H N H. FUND Alen for President...
...With that, Allen folds up the resignation speech she had been prepared to make and takes the oath of office...
...Series writers couldn't give me any examples where the chief villains will be anything but backward-looking troglodytes...
...being released less than a month before the presidential election...
...The black and white symbolism of the movie en-raged Oldham, one of its stars...
...Over time, he was transformed into a corrupt, frothing monster...
...He told Premiere magazine that it was ruined after it was twisted into "a piece of propaganda" designed to help Al Gore...
...TO MATTER HOW HARD IT TRIES, Commander in Chief doesn't seem likely to avoid the trap of smug liberalism...
Vol. 38 • November 2005 • No. 9
