Docu-Blog/Steve's POV: Requiem for a candidate

October 13, 2005

Requiem for a candidate

Requiem for a candidate
Reliving the John Kerry campaign at the movies
BY ADAM REILLY

LIKABLE SUBJECT At some points, Inside the Bubble actually humanizes Kerry.

Inside the Bubble, a new documentary about John Kerry’s failed 2004 presidential campaign, hasn’t hit theaters yet. In fact, it doesn’t even have a distributor. But judging from the buzz that’s developing around the film — which debuted at the New York Television Festival last week — that should change soon. Late last month, New York Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove hyped it as "potentially devastating," and quoted an unnamed source who said it could be "the silver bullet that kills Kerry’s presidential chances for 2008." The Note, ABC’s heavily trafficked political Web site, gushed that "there are almost no boring scenes in this film," and praised the Kerry-focused segments as "quite revealing."

Kerry partisans have been less kind. The Unofficial John Kerry Blog (kerryblog.blogspot.com) suggested that Inside the Bubble should be retitled The Snore Room — an unflattering reference to The War Room, the 1993 Clinton-campaign documentary — and dismissed its director, Steve Rosenbaum, as "a shill [for] the infamous Swift Liars and the red elephants." (Rosenbaum says he votes Democratic.) They’re not the only skeptics. Recently, John Dickerson, Slate’s political correspondent, lamented the film’s focus on second-tier operatives and the corresponding absence of top advisors like Bob Shrum and John Sasso, each of whom barely shows up over the course of almost two hours.

For the most part, this debate is good news for the filmmakers, since it pumps up public awareness of their project. But it’s a bit perplexing for prospective viewers. Is Inside the Bubble a critical masterwork that will end all talk of a second Kerry nomination? Or a frustratingly insubstantial piece of fluff?

Split the difference, and you’ve got your answer. In the end, Inside the Bubble is both a flawed and compelling film — which is only fitting, since John Kerry was both a flawed and compelling candidate.

First the bad news. Anyone who watches Inside the Bubble in hopes of seeing the nominee and his inner circle planning or processing pivotal campaign moments — Kerry reporting for duty at the Democratic National Convention, Kerry windsurfing off Nantucket, Kerry noting that he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it, Kerry whupping George W. Bush in the first presidential debate — will be deeply disappointed.

Take the case of the DNC and Kerry’s ill-advised military salute. Ideally, we’d witness Kerry and his closest aides immediately before and after (think Shrum and Sasso high-fiving behind the curtain, or Kerry pulling an Eric LaSalle as he walks offstage). Barring that, we’d see footage of the media and advance types who serve as Inside the Bubble’s stars — spokesperson David Wade, communications director Stephanie Cutter, senior press wrangler Jim Loftus, traveling chief of staff David Morehouse, and Kerry aide and confidant Marvin Nicholson — reacting moments later, or reassessing months afterward with the benefit of hindsight. Instead, we’re forced to settle for Vanity Fair media critic Michael Wolff (who, oddly, is the sole voice of independent analysis or reflection in the film) recounting how dismayed he was when Kerry made that particular gambit. Wolff can be an engaging commentator, but he’s not the subject of this documentary. And learning his thoughts doesn’t increase our sense of immediacy or deepen our understanding of the internal workings of the Kerry campaign. Regrettably, this weakness pervades the entire film.

There is a silver lining here for Kerry and his boosters, however — namely, the absence of piercing insight also means that no fatal flaws are revealed. Granted, there are times when Kerry looks bad. One example: at a sparsely attended press conference on an airport tarmac, the senator simply ignores a question from Globe reporter Glen Johnson about Bush’s stem-cell-research record, an episode that suggests the senator’s reputation for arrogance and aloofness is at least partially deserved. But there’s no damning moment, no shot of Kerry reducing a low-level aide to tears, or mocking evangelical Christians, or wondering aloud if Howard Dean should have been the nominee.

One much-discussed segment seems, at first glance, to approach that level. It comes in the second presidential debate, when Kerry criticizes the current tax parameters for small businesses. As the owner of a timber company, Kerry notes, Bush himself can be defined as a small-business owner under the existing federal tax code.

After Bush laughs this off — "I own a timber company? That’s news to me! Need some wood?" — we watch Hillary Clinton roll her eyes in the audience and see Kerry’s staffers looking dumbfounded ("What the fuck was he talking about?" Morehouse mutters). Coming on the heels of Kerry’s virtuoso showing in the first debate, these scenes remind us of one of Kerry’s worst attributes: his unfailing ability, whenever he had an opportunity to build momentum, to undercut himself with some painful public gaffe.

Except that that’s not the whole story. As FactCheck.org reported later, back in 2003, Bush identified himself as a part owner of LSTF, a company that produces trees for commercial sale. Hillary’s eye-roll notwithstanding, Kerry didn’t fuck up here. Instead, Bush dodged a valid criticism by slipping into his faux-everyman persona, something the president has always done maddeningly well. Inside the Bubble should make this clear. But it doesn’t.

All that said, the film is stronger and more engaging than its harshest detractors would suggest. To begin with, it drives home the grim realities of high-level campaign work — the anxiety, the monotony, the claustrophobia, the exhaustion — in an unexpectedly visceral way. The three main characters, Loftus, Morehouse, and Nicholson, have radically different temperaments: Loftus is voluble, Morehouse is an even-keeled family man, Nicholson is a joker with a dry sense of humor. But by the end of the film, we see each of them pushed to their physical and psychological limits.

More significantly, the film occasionally humanizes Kerry, and even casts him in a noble light. With the jockeying for ’08 already under way in earnest, it’s hard to find anyone excited by the prospect of a second Kerry run. The right candidate could have beaten Bush, or so the thinking goes, and Kerry simply wasn’t the right candidate. As a corollary to this point of view, there’s plenty of lingering anti-Kerry resentment. Why did you wait so long to fight back against the Swift Boat Veterans? Why, even after it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, did you say that had you known that at the time you still would have voted for the war? And why did you wear that stupid barn jacket?

So it’s a bit of a surprise to see Kerry emerge — to the extent he emerges at all in Inside the Bubble — as a genuinely likable figure. Again, the lack of interviews with Kerry is a huge hole in the film, but when we do see Kerry, he’s usually behaving winningly. Three days before the election, Kerry talks with Cutter, his press secretary, about the number of Senate bills he’s been credited with passing. Kerry seems to think the Globe is selling him short, and he wants her to rectify the situation. This shot, too, has been much discussed, in large part because Kerry’s Senate record was MIA for essentially all of the campaign. But the most striking aspect of this exchange is Kerry’s gentleness: the candidate can’t afford any last-minute gaffes, but he makes his point quietly and respectfully.

In yet another scene, Kerry sits in a locker room at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, waiting to do a satellite interview that’s plagued with technical difficulties. At one point, he talks to himself in Italian; at another, he jokes about the stench in the room. But what really stands out in this particular shot is the loneliness of the candidate. Kerry blinks into the klieg lights, laboring to amuse himself and his handlers and then switching into full interview mode (complete with full interview smile) as soon as the satellite connection is made. Along the way, we can see the fatigue set in, both emotional and physical. And we feel an unexpected surge of sympathy for this talented, accomplished, infuriatingly self-destructive man, who came so close to delivering us from Bush but who couldn’t get the job done. For that alone, Rosenbaum deserves a great deal of credit.

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly@phx.com.