Horses, Dogs, Etc.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2004 11:20 PM
The one thing I forgot to mention about the problem with "Don't change horses in midstream" was Wag the Dog. Wag the Dog, if you have not seen it, is at once clever, funny, perverse, insulting, and distressing. In the movie, an incumbent president's re-election slogan is the aforementioned cliché. The slogan runs in these patronizing, white washed ads that are deliberately overdone and pandering. That movie always springs to mind when I hear those five words. It's a cynic's tale, really—a president's second term chances hobbled by a despicable sex scandal (it's really quite awful), his somewhat amoral operatives (winning-is-always-a-legitimate-end-types) enlist a Hollywood producer to stage a phony war. The underlying logic? No one votes against a sitting president during war time!

Things, of course, don't work out as planned, but the point is that these guys are willing to try any crass plan to keep their guy. The slogan is the least of it, but, for me, the taint is there. It plays like just another thing to say that sounds convincing but is really just a shallow argument. I just hate that.

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