My candidate! But not necessarily the right one

National Review, Oct 25, 2004 by Rob Long

So the reason Kerry's creepy pomposity is so worrying to those people who do not see everything though an entertainment-industry lens--and there are people like that, I'm told--is that inflated self-adoring blowhards are incredibly easy to trick. Rufus T. Firefly, the Groucho Marx character in Duck Soup, makes short work of Mrs. Teasdale (played by the inimitable Sen. John Kerry). And in A Night at the Opera, the crafty and swindling Otis B. Driftwood (played by many actors, including Kim Jong Il, Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac, Bashar Assad, Yasser Arafat, and the entire membership of the trial lawyers' association) runs circles around the hapless, smug Mrs. Claypool (John Kerry in another dazzling, sidesplitting performance).

Film buffs, of course, will be sure to remind us that Kerry's performance as the credulous nonentity takes its inspiration from the ancients. Jimmy Carter, as we'll all recognize, has played this kind of part before, and better: As the serenely confident envoy to North Korea, certain of his own magnificent powers of persuasion, he tangled with crafty madman Kim Jong Il in Kiss Me! I'm Nuts! and ended up signing a treaty that the North Koreans were already violating. Senator Kerry, with his love of summits and meetings and the sound of his own voice, clearly wants a remake.

He'll have lots of help. He's gathering a cast of fellow pompous windbags as I write. His future secretary of state, Richard Holbrooke, playing the part of Lil'Wise Man in Hatin' in Dayton 1995, managed, through sheer Dumontery and self-love, to convince himself that the Dayton Peace Accords, which with fantastic comic unpredictability preceded the war in Kosovo, were worth the paper they were printed on. Fantastic! We were rolling in the aisles! And his friends in the news media--Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and the rest of the stars of The Ladies Who Lunch--are circling the studio in makeup, ready for their close-ups. They have a natural affinity for a candidate whose only strategy to win the War on Terror is to talk, to meet, to pose, to preen, and to revel in his own oozing speech. I mean, that's what they do all day, too. It would be hard to write the same movie about, say, a shorter, squintier guy with a cracker accent. Bush doesn't belong in a comedy, really--oh, sure, the mixed-up-words thing is good for relief, maybe, but where he really belongs is in a war picture. He's the grouchy sergeant, the grim-faced captain, the enlisted guy stirring a pot of beans. In a surreal antiwar comedy like Duck Soup he'd be lost, because Duck Soup is about "war," not, you know, war. Bush is a stubborn guy--that's pretty clear to everyone--but there's a difference between stubbornness, which at its worst devolves into peevish grouching, and pomposity, which at its worst devolves into convincing yourself that owing to your brilliant and nuanced summitry, no more planes will fly into no more buildings. Which movie do you want to watch?

In fact, Duck Soup is awfully funny. There's a great scene in which Rufus T. Firefly tries to woo the rich, widowed Mrs. Teasdale. Groucho swoons around Margaret Dumont, and her eyes light up with delight. Groucho asks about her dead husband: "Will you marry me? Did he leave you a lot of money? Answer the second question first." She tells him that yes, he did indeed leave her his entire fortune. "Can't you see what I'm trying to tell you?" Groucho says immediately. "I love you!"