You can almost here the cries of “Too soon! Too soon!”

Following up on the campaign that wouldn't end, political scribblers Mark Halperin (no relation to this writer) and John Heilemann are going to ensure that the 2012 election lives forever in breezy prose. Following up on their bestselling, absurdly readable account of the 2008 race, “Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” Halperin and Heilemann will be unleashing “Double Down: Game Change 2012” on a defenseless public, the Hollywood Reporter reports. Penguin is the publisher and HBO has already optioned the book.

Continue Reading...

Tie it to his car as a hood ornament, naturally. Actor Tom Hanks tweeted this video to his fans last night, after his Emmy win for producing "Game Change."

Tom Hanks on WhoSay

Continue Reading...

Eric Stonestreet's pitch-perfect acceptance

Acknowledging his sitcom husband, Stonestreet said, "I wouldn't be standing here without Jesse Tyler Ferguson. There is no Cam without Mitch." Then he continued, beautifully, "We get the awesome opportunity to play these two characters on TV and show America and the world what a loving couple we can be, just like everybody else, and it's an honor to do that," and added, "I never knew I'd be on TV as a gay man, but I love the pictures of hairy chests you guys are sending me." Sweet and touching and very funny.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus' win … for Amy Poehler

Continue Reading...

“Homeland” kept “Mad Men” from winning its fifth straight best drama award in a row, but by the time this award — the second to last of the night — was announced, “Homeland” not winning something, anything, would have been the surprise. As Jon Stewart put it, after beating out “The Colbert Report” yet again, in the future aliens “will find a box [of his Emmys], and find out just how fucking predictable they are.” Or, to put it another way, this year Jon Cryer won best actor in a comedy for his role in “Two and a Half Men.” Oh boy.

Continue Reading...

That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it's unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well -- remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it's to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could've dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.

Continue Reading...

Oddly enough, Strong began his entertainment career playing key roles in cult series – Jonathan Levinson on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”; Paris’ boyfriend on “Gilmore Girls”; the hopeful copywriter hired after Don Draper stole his idea on “Mad Men.” We caught up with him in Atlanta last week.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Everyone already knows everything about that election. It will be fun, I guess, to watch famous people pretend to be other famous people. For a while. But that particular pleasure usually wears off about three minutes into your average "SNL" political cold open. And we are all already intimately familiar with nearly everything our dramatis personae will do and say.

I, for one, would rather watch a film dramatizing the 1948 election. Or 1876! Almost any close election that happened prior to the age of 24-hour cable news and blogs would be infinitely more interesting to watch unfold on television than the one everyone in the nation just sat through.

Continue Reading...

With so many guesses, you would have thought somebody would have hit on award-winner Julianne Moore to play the Alaskan governor, since according to a Deadline Hollywood bulletin from today, that's who the producers are going with.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

I refer to the ubiquitous publicity attending the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's book "Game Change," reportedly an insider account of the 2008 presidential campaign by the largely anonymous aides and consultants who lost it. Observing virtually the entire "Gang of 500" -- as Halperin's clubby Internet rumor sheet The Note calls its audience -- going ape over the fool thing you could almost hear them emit an audible sigh of relief.

Enough tedium about healthcare, jobs, taxes, financial regulation and foreign affairs. Back to what really matters to these fops and courtiers: what Newsweek's Howard Fineman called "tweetable nuggets." As so often happens, Fineman speaks for them all: "A long analysis of the demographics of the electorate is not going to get you an HBO movie," he said. "But the tawdry psycho-drama of the Edwards's and a racist crack by Harry Reid will."

Continue Reading...

Based on material fed to them by McCain campaign advisors and strategists, whose animus against Palin is no secret, authors Mark Halperin of Time and John Heilemann of New York magazine describe Palin as stunningly ignorant, lazy, dangerous -- and possibly nuts. According to them, she didn’t know the difference between World War I and World War II or North and South Korea.

Those anecdotes and adjectives probably reflect the ultimate assessment of the hockey mom by the men responsible for her nomination (which tells us as much about them as about her). But shouldn’t Heilemann and Halperin have given Palin the opportunity to rebut, or at least deny, the stupid things she is accused of saying? ("60 Minutes"  did.)

Continue Reading...

On Sunday I wrote about the book's "revelation" that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used the term "Negro dialect" referring to Barack Obama. I wrote then about my discomfort with the book's mostly anonymous sourcing – there is no index or source notes – as well as its strange practice of "quoting" inflammatory statements in mere sentence fragments, without full context, and Heilemann and Halperin's Bob Woodward-like zest for recreating thoughts and conversations they couldn't have been a party to. (I particularly enjoyed the opening scene, set in Obama's room at a Des Moines Hampton Inn just before the Iowa caucuses, when the candidate woke up anxious in the middle of the night, feeling like "the dog that caught the bus." Were they there? Now that's a story!) I have the book, and I'm making my way through it, but I'm surprised more people aren't asking the questions I have about it. And that's what I told Schultz, somewhat to his surprise.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

I am reading "Game Change" now and will update this entry once I've completed the portions about Hillary Clinton but I wanted to post something immediately in response to the Politico story.

Continue Reading...

That's former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, talking to radio host Laura Ingraham about the new book "Game Change," in which former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is quoted as saying, "I don't think Romney has a soul."

This isn't a religious argument, though Romney also made a joke about that; it's about the sense many observers have -- and apparently, many of his opponents as well -- that Romney's principles are very flexible and depend upon electoral politics.

(Hat-tip to Hotline On Call.)

Continue Reading...

It was, to put it mildly, something of an awkward spectacle. Reid was just quoted as describing Obama as "light-skinned" and praising him for having "no Negro dialect, unless he want[s] to have one." And Monday, at the press conference, he was trying to fix that apparently self-inflicted wound by saying, "First of all, I am very proud that [I was] if not the first, one of the first people to suggest that Barack Obama run for president. I'm very happy about that."

Reid also spent some time name-dropping prominent people of color whom, he says, have expressed their support.

Continue Reading...

Democrats don't want to let the Senate majority leader's inanely phrased musings about why President Obama would appeal to white voters (his light skin and his lack of "Negro dialect," as you've surely heard by now) become any more of a vulnerability for Reid than they already have been. A new poll in Nevada before the quotes came out showed Reid trailing any of his Republican challengers and rated favorably by only 33 percent of voters. Moving quickly past the comments, in "Game Change," a new book on the 2008 election, could be a matter of political survival for him.

So as the GOP works itself up into ever-higher dudgeon about Reid's remarks, Democrats are pushing back, aggressively, against his critics. "One thing he's not going to do is allow Republicans like John Cornyn and Jon Kyl to beat him up over this," said one source close to Reid's camp. "You take John Cornyn and Jon Kyl's NAACP ratings, add them together, spot 'em 20 points and it still wouldn't come close to Reid's."

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

But politics aside—if that is allowed—I was most concerned about the flip way that many commentators dismissed the Reid statement as unimportant. There is a reason why so many people were put off by his statements. I think that his words tap into a very old history shaped around questions of color and respectability and its meaning in American politics.

As historian, this debate makes me think of older arguments about African American citizenship. During Reconstruction there were well-meaning people who debated whether or not the freed slaves were ready for citizenship. Perhaps they needed more time, more education. By the turn of the twentieth century, black citizenship was being systematically destroyed by disfranchisement, lynching, and racial segregation. African Americans had made dramatic gains in education, and yet their opportunities were eroding. Many had banked on respectability as a political tool and were left disappointed.

Continue Reading...