As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit addicted to MSNBC, mostly because it’s where loose-canon conservatives go to fade away. So I’ve been watching it, like, a lot. And I know they’re working live without a script, but is that really an excuse for the whole team to fall back on the Chris Matthews gold standard of dragging metaphors out of movies? In the past 12 hours, I’ve heard Brian Williams, Andrea Mitchell and Joe Scarborough all compare Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech to The American President, the Rob Reiner/Aaron Sorkin political romantic dramedy starring Michael Douglas and Annette Benning.
Mitchell and friends have been breathlessly fawning over that line from Obama’s speech where he was all, “If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next commander-in-chief, that’s a debate I’m ready to have.” They seem to think parallel is to the above scene, where Douglas’ president shows up at a press conference and, out of nowhere, takes a stand on an issue and dares his critics to essentially talk their shit to his face. They’ve been trying to sell the similarities as though it was a word-for-word lift, although of course they’d never cry “plagiarism”––they make it sound more like Obama fell asleep watching TNT and lines from Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay seeped into his brain and just came out with the candidate unawares.
In fact, it’s not that similar, either in tone or in actual content, and it makes me wonder whether the Sorkin comparison would have been a talking point no matter what Obama actually said. Maybe America’s middle-of-the-road lefties have been fantasizing about living in an Aaron Sorkin movie for so long that they’re now actually––consciously or otherwise––willing it to happen.
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