Mark Crispin Miller: Does "Recount" Do More Harm Than Good?

[babylonsister]

Does "Recount" Do More Harm Than Good?
Submitted by davidswanson on Sat, 2008-06-07 12:45.


By Mark Crispin Miller


Here (attached) are two great takes on Recount, written by unrivaled experts on the Florida catastrophe: David W. Moore, who, as a top executive at Gallup, was in the trenches on Election Night, and witnessed how the race got called for Bush; and Lance DeHaven-Smith, Professor of Public Administration at Florida Atlantic University, and author/editor of The Battle for Florida, a seminal collection of the major documents. (Both also have essays on Florida 2000 in Loser Take All.)

Let me introduce their work with my own view of Recount (which just ended its first run on HBO). It's quite a gripping movie, tightly structured and fast-paced, and all too credible. Indeed, Recount is so vivid that it hurts, as it returns us to that long, slow nightfall when we all sat watching as Bush/Cheney "won," and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. (By "we all," I don't mean Democrats--as a New Yorker, I did not vote for Al Gore--but we believers in the Constitution, fair elections, and reality.) Many people talk about the movie by uneasily noting that it made them feel exactly as they felt back then: crushed, defeated, powerless--a sense of helplessness, I've heard some say, that darkens their anticipation of this next election.

Now, some might praise the movie for so strong an evocation of that moment some eight years ago, but I would say that, by inducing that old feeling of paralysis, Recount does more harm than good. Indeed, I liked it less and less the more I thought about it, realizing that it could have left us in a very different frame of mind. If the movie had been braver and more honest, daring to recount the bigger and much darker story of how Team Bush really "won," it would have had the paradoxical effect of leaving us not whimpering in remembered pain but standing up in righteous anger, calling for investigations, prosecutions and-especially-reform. HBO's own Hacking Democracy had something of that positive effect, contributing immensely to the movement against electronic voting; and there is no good reason why this movie too could not have moved us beyond fatalism.

But Recount stays on safer ground. Although the film is often chilling, its conception of the struggle in the Sunshine State is ultimately comforting, and very simple: a giant post-election brawl between the two campaigns, one nasty and one nice as pie. The Bush team won, according to this view, because they were far tougher and more agile than Gore's people, improvising ruthlessly from day to day, until they pulled it off. Thus the GOP did not engage in a conspiracy (there is, in fact, no other word for it), but triumphed sheerly through their fierce--but surely not illegal--tactics after the Election.

The filmmakers derived this view from several mainstream books, whose authors served as paid consultants on the project: Jeffrey Toobin's Too Close to Call, Jake Tapper's Down and Dirty, David A. Kaplan's The Accidental President, and Deadlock by David von Drehle and Ellen Nakashima. Written by outsiders (representing, respectively, The New Yorker/CNN, ABC News, Newsweek and The Washington Post), these books largely skim the surface of events, offering little background on the politics of Florida; and--even more important--they stick close to the Establishment consensus that there's no election fraud in the United States. Such, therefore, is the bias of the movie, which, as Lance DeHaven-Smith notes here, bends over backwards (as it were) not to indict Team Bush for any crimes.

Hence the movie's over-focus on James Baker, the old cynic who was called in after Election Day to manage the theatrics--a task he carries out with cold aplomb, and a certain scary charm, thanks to Tom Wilkinson's excellent performance. (Baker, understandably, quite liked Recount.) Meanwhile, Jeb Bush is almost wholly absent from the film, which represents him as a mere by-stander, even though his office ran the massive drive to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Floridians. On the misuse of the felons lists to sideline all those Democratic voters, Jeb worked hand in glove with Katherine Harris-whom the movie casts as an erratic flake, who needed firm control by Baker's men. Although she was indeed a weirdo, Harris also was a dedicated supervisor of the winning effort to erase those voters from the rolls, but you wouldn't know it from Recount, which groundlessly depicts her as somewhat ambivalent about her mission. (An acolyte of theocratic luminary Francis Schaeffer--she went to Switzerland to study with him--Harris seems to have perceived her work against the voters as her Christian duty; and yet the film plays her religiosity for laughs.)

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http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/33943

[papau]

1. What the hell did anyone expect from a Bev Harris advised movie - an election reform push? LOL

[babylonsister]

2. Do you EVER have anything positive to say? nt