Read the full transcript of Michael Moore’s speech at The Huffington Post

And whether you think Moore is a brave soul fighting the power or a self-aggrandizing blowhard who’s mainly selling himself, it’s clear he has a knack for insinuating himself into the head space of all sorts of people — those who have no opinion on him, those who are glad he’s alive, and those who fantasize about pouring a vat of beef stew over his head and tossing him into a pit full of wolverines. I suspect Moore’s highly subjective, emotion-driven filmmaking and his career-long interweaving of self-promotion and self-expression (which started back in 1989 with his anti-General Motors jeremiad “Roger & Me”) will one day be seen as epitomizing aspects of life in this grim, weird decade, just as Hunter S. Thompson’s song-of-myself political writing helped future generations understand the ’70s.

When artists construct such a compelling public face, the art and the artist fuse, even loop back on themselves so that it’s tough to tell where one begins and the other ends. It’s a conundrum the modern artist can’t escape, and maybe shouldn’t; when an artist resists becoming the story, the media and the public tend to decide there isn’t one. Moore knows vastly fewer people would talk about his movies, or even bother to see them, if he weren’t out there on talk shows and in front of his own documentary lens raising hell, cracking wise, taunting the powerful, comforting the powerless and otherwise carrying on like the bastard spawn of Will Rogers and Amy Goodman.

In any event, Moore the director has been politically and artistically (and on the Internet, technologically) vital — not to mention adept at identifying subjects of mass dread and getting films about them into the marketplace right around the time said dread achieves critical mass. In the last 10 years, Moore has addressed the self-perpetuating cycle of fear and violence in America (“Bowling for Columbine“), the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror (“Fahrenheit 9/11”) and the arguments in favor of state-run, or at least state-assisted, healthcare (“Sicko”).

Moore’s latest, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” might be the key Moore film, its title serving as an umbrella that shades every other subject he’s tackled. The answer to every “Why?” in a Moore film can be answered, “Because of money.” Its arguments are too fuzzy and its thesis too broad to achieve the level of popular relevance to which Moore has become accustomed; Americans prefer ideas they can hold in their hands. But whatever “Capitalism’s” reception, the fact remains that nobody else is making political films on such basic and important subjects and getting them so widely distributed and discussed.

None of Moore’s films this decade were as prominent as “Fahrenheit 9/11,” because none had a main character as charismatic and polarizing as President George W. Bush. It was the first feature that Moore tried to stay out of, to the extent that Moore can stay out of anything, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his decision was motivated both by a desire to foreground the message rather than the messenger and an entertainer’s understanding that you can’t steal the spotlight from a child, a pet — or W. himself. (Add to that the fact that Moore, who positions himself as the good guy in his own mythic narratives, hadn’t had a truly intimidating adversary since GM boss Roger Smith.)

The prospect of making the president lose reelection, or at least lose sleep, formalized the (often contrived) underdog mantle that Moore has always wrapped around himself like a cape. And it encouraged Moore to spotlight his insult comic’s vicious wit, setting one of the movie’s expository passages about the president’s youth to Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” and letting Bush’s paralysis in that classroom on the morning of 9/11 play out at length. One rarely sees a documentary whose whole purpose is to tear down another person, and that dubious distinction made “Fahrenheit 9/11″ electrifying — if only to liberals who felt helpless in the face of the president’s political, military and media machines and prayed that somebody somewhere would stand up, say something, do something.

Bush’s brazenness post-Iraq seemed to crank up Moore’s urgency and grandiosity. Around the time “Fahrenheit 9/11″ came out, Moore declared that his goal was nothing less than the electoral defeat — or re-defeat, as the bumper stickers said — of the president (whether the film ultimately hurt or helped the president is an important, but unanswerable question). To achieve that end, Moore paints Bush’s definitive negative caricature, presenting him as a hateful fraud, an ignorant brat playing with mass-murdering toys, a fake macho man whose cornball swagger was purchased with daddy’s money and America’s military might, and a bumpkin prince of darkness whose descent upon the Capitol following the electoral shenanigans of 2000 was a metaphysical as well as political catastrophe. And the film’s opening credits are one of the decade’s most powerful sequences: Bush and his Cabinet being made up for TV appearances while mournful, minor-key acoustic guitar plays in the background is a devastating marriage of image and sound, one that conjures sadness, rage and fear. The sequence is a liberal’s dirge. Democracy is dead, and here are its murderers putting on their war paint and getting ready to finish off the rest of us. (Facing down the president ennobled Moore’s asshole tendencies. His adversary was so powerful and so smug about his power that Moore couldn’t go too far in attacking him – at least not as he did in “Bowling for Columbine,” in which he trespassed on the property of the elderly, unprepared and clearly baffled NRA spokesman Charlton Heston and answered his gentlemanly incredulity with snotty contempt.)

“Fahrenheit 9/11″ was arguably the documentary of the decade, a work that tried to change history as well as describe it and, if not a classic of logical argument, then surely a masterpiece of outrage, propaganda as formally skillful as it was emotionally opportunistic. (Moore’s use of war veterans and their loved ones was the liberal flip side of W. treating uniformed soldiers as TV props to burnish his warrior bona fides.) And it was everywhere in 2004 — in theaters, on TV, on the Web. Even if you hated Moore’s guts and wouldn’t see the movie if your life depended on it, you still ended up reading about it, hearing the film’s merits argued and its errors and distortions catalogued. Moore shows the world what American liberal anger looks like — a furious but ephemeral force that rarely stays roused for long, liberals being notoriously inclined to bitch rather than act unless it’s a presidential election year. Elsewhere this decade he prided himself not just on participating in the national argument, but also on setting its terms. His films supplied liberals with talking points on gun violence, 9/11, the war on terror, healthcare and financial chicanery. His Web site, public speeches and coordinated e-mail campaigns endorse or oppose presidential decisions, political candidates and propose new laws. (Moore’s “Letter From Mike” feature is written, quite effectively, in the jes’ folks style of his movie narration. “It’s not your job to do what the generals tell you to do,” Moore writes, in an “open letter” to President Barack Obama urging him not to add more troops in Afghanistan, adding, “With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the ‘war president.’” For better or worse, Moore is one of a few filmmakers who could publish such a letter and rest assured that a president (or his people) might even read it.

He’s the enemy the right deserves and probably craves. He is his own self-caricature, and craftier and more gifted than detractors care to admit. He’s a standard-bearer in the rhetorical civil war that Mailer, in 1963′s “The Presidential Papers,” foretold as inevitable fallout from the end of the Cold War — “the war which has meaning, that great and mortal debate between rebel and conservative where each would argue the other is an agent of the Devil.” 

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in’ hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

Here’s the thing, though: Obama wasn’t exactly hiding his position on Afghanistan during the presidential campaign. The war there was often thought of as the “good war” on the left, at least in comparison to the one the Bush administration started when it invaded Iraq. And that meant refocusing resources on Afghanistan.

Still, while it’s pretty clear that Moore’s open letter won’t change Obama’s mind, and that Obama is likely to win a fight with Moore right now, it also appears that the floodgates are opening. With former President George W. Bush out of office, liberals are coming forward to oppose escalation in Afghanistan, and Moore won’t be the last prominent figure from the left to slam Obama over it.

As with all Michael Moore’s films, that’s not to say he doesn’t have a point, buried in there somewhere amid all the Silly Putty-stretched facts and cartoony music. It’s possible to agree with Moore in theory and still find his tactics sloppy and ineffective (though his zombie-like followers don’t like to allow for the existence of any potential gray areas, maybe because gray areas tend to demand actual thought). In the 2007 “Sicko,” he highlighted some very real, and very dangerous, problems with the U.S. healthcare system. In the 2004 “Fahrenheit 9/11,” he asserted that our then-president was bad for America, and that the Iraq war was wrong. If you’re reading this right now, it’s 99 percent likely that you agree, as I do, with Moore’s basic take on those subjects.

The problem with Moore’s approach is that he reveals these injustices as if he’s just discovered them himself. Similarly, “Capitalism: A Love Story” will be revelatory and helpful to those Rip Van Winkles who slept through the fall of 2008 and the early part of 2009, who didn’t realize that hardworking American people are being pushed out of their homes in record numbers as a direct result of corporate greed. It’s not Moore’s core beliefs that are grating: It’s his consistently wide-eyed approach, his presupposition that you need to adopt an aura of innocence in order to be outraged. In Michael Moore’s world, to be enlightened and outraged makes you one of the elite — better to be an underinformed Everyman, so he can spoon-feed the facts to you and therefore reinforce his own reason for existing.

Moore’s aim here is to prove that capitalism, at least as big business currently defines it, is bad. It wasn’t always thus: Moore includes footage from his own family’s home movies, showing a smiling young Mike enjoying the pleasures of life in Flint, Mich., circa the 1950s. (Moore’s father, who appears in the film, was a longtime G.M. employee.) Moore explains in voice-over that his family wasn’t rich by any means, but they were definitely comfortable: The house in which he grew up had been fully paid for by the time he was in kindergarten; his parents could buy a new car every three years. This is Moore’s way of explaining — and he’s not wrong — that many working people could take part in the capitalism of the ’50s, but capitalism as it’s practiced today is another story.

In his usual hopscotching fashion, Moore goes on to explore numerous instances of corporate greed and its effects on working people: He interviews several young pilots, working for regional airlines, who are trained and entrusted to operate aircraft and yet who barely make enough money to get by. (One of them explains that he had to go on food stamps.) He interviews Peter Zalewski, a scarily slick type who works for a Florida real-estate concern called, in a stroke of brazen forthrightness, “Condo Vultures,” which specializes in matching foreclosed properties with buyers, who resell them for a profit. He decries last fall’s banking-industry bailout, and bemoans the way the recipients squandered the money they received instead of using it to either save endangered jobs or create new ones.

But Moore doesn’t shed any new light on this kind of greed, and his attempts to grab his audience are so strained that they detract from his essential argument. His tactics here include conducting on-camera interviews with families who have just been pushed out of their homes. For understandable reasons, these people are often brought to tears as they vent their outrage and sadness, their sense of loss. In case we’re not getting the point, Moore puts gloppy, sentimental string music on the soundtrack, as if he believes viewers can’t be trusted to grasp the basic horror of the situation on their own. At another point, he marches up to AIG headquarters on Wall Street (it appears to be on a Sunday morning, when no one’s around — Wall Street is bustling on any weekday), declaring to the security guards that he’s there to make a citizen’s arrest of the CEO. The security guards rebuff Moore firmly but politely, as if he were a crazy but harmless old auntie — they’d serve Moore’s purposes better if they were angry or bullying.

Moore does hit a number of crucial points, making note, for example, of the large number of former Goldman Sachs executives who figure prominently in both the current and previous administrations. But he can’t let 10 minutes pass without injecting himself into the conversation: Moore can’t mention the sad collapse of Detroit without taking credit for foreseeing these kinds of problems in “Roger & Me,” as if he’d offered some kind of viable advice that simply hadn’t been taken. He tells us how, when he was a lad, his dream was to enter the priesthood, because he so admired the work of Catholic priests who became involved in the fight for civil rights. This is his way of reminding us how noble his goals are — that all he ever really wanted to do was fight for the little people.

But his respect for the priesthood does make sense in terms of his misguided sense of pageantry. In “Capitalism: A Love Story,” he can’t resist showing himself outside the hallowed halls of Citibank (and Chase, and AIG), trying to gain access and, of course, being refused. Those scenes have become tired staples of every Moore film, a recycled vaudeville act that’s supposed to be funny, surprising or outrageous each time we see it. Scenes like that are necessary to reinforce Moore’s status as an outsider, and his loyal fans, it seems, never get tired of seeing them. At this point, Moore appears to be making movies specifically for those fans — he’s no longer even pretending to try to win over the general populace. With “Capitalism: A Love Story,” he’s preaching to people who have already been converted, 20 times over. As for the others, no matter how loudly he shouts through his bullhorn, he’s not going to get their attention.

In that recriminatory chapter, there will likely be a section about the exceptions: left-leaning, often satirical media outlets like “The Daily Show” and the Onion, whose headlines in the run-up to the invasion included “Bush Won’t Stop Asking Cheney if We Can Invade Yet” and “Bush Seeks U.N. Support for ‘U.S. Does Whatever It Wants Plan.’” These exceptions are the focus of
“The New Blue Media: How Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, Jon Stewart and Company Are Transforming Progressive Politics” by Theodore Hamm, the founding editor of the arts and politics journal the Brooklyn Rail. The book is what Hamm calls a “critical tribute” to a group of liberal commentators and outlets — Stephen Colbert, Air America and blogs like Daily Kos and MyDD — that have emerged in the last decade. In chronicling their rise and influence, Hamm suggests that some of the most meaningful and independent political discourse has come from the least “serious” of sources. If the book sometimes reads as a bit credulous — there is perhaps more tribute than criticism here — it may be because Hamm cannot conceal his gratitude for what was for him an invaluable source of relief in a bleak time.

Salon spoke to Hamm about the emergence and growing influence of these media outlets and about the future of progressive political discourse.

In “The New Blue Media” you chart the emergence of media entities like the Onion, Air America, Michael Moore, liberal bloggers, “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” Other than the fact that they are all left-leaning, what makes them a cohesive group or phenomenon?

The project actually originated in the campaign that most of us would like to forget, 2004. The netroots — MoveOn and the blogosphere, which was still kind of young at that time — had essentially backed Howard Dean, but then when Dean imploded and John Kerry became the electable nominee, pretty much everyone on the liberal-leaning left rallied to support him. MoveOn, Michael Moore, Air America, when it was launched in 2004 — they were all kind of joining together, sometimes directly at particular events, or by appearing on each other’s shows and by doing other kinds of cross-promotions, and so there was a constellation of different new media outlets that were pushing Kerry in 2004.

In the section on Air America, you mention that certain corporations like McDonald’s and Hewlett Packard refused to advertise with the network, and you suggest that corporate pressure could be a possible danger for progressive media outlets aspiring to reach the levels of commercial success attained by right-wing media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. I wonder if you think the failure of Air America has more to do with the fact it was on the left or with the way it delivered those leftist views?

I think the reason it failed was because of its business model, trying to start as a national network, rather than starting with syndicated programming. And had it retained some of the attempts at comedy, that might have made it more appealing as well. They were also delivering the same kind of mush that was being put forth by Kerry and the Democrats in 2004. Air America didn’t really create anything that new or independent, and then it wasn’t entertaining, at the same time.

I was interested to read just how entrenched the Clinton camp was in the early development of Air America and in Al Franken’s other projects.

Sure, and that put the network so clearly in tandem with the Democratic Party that they weren’t really offering anything independent. And you know, you see that on the right. Limbaugh and company obviously are in alignment with the Republican Party, but they also depart on issues that they hold dear — immigration and so on. There was a spirit of independence lacking in Air America.

And you see that spirit of independence more in the netroots movement. Can you explain what you mean by netroots?

The netroots are the grass roots of the Democratic Party that are organized online, the Internet-based activism that started with MoveOn and mydd.org [now mydd.com] and some of the early blogs, like Daily Kos. The netroots have maintained a spirit of independence, but it fluctuates there as well.

In some ways, the netroots seem sort of like the progressive or left-wing answer to what the Republicans and the Christian Coalition did in the 1980s. That kind of grass-roots politics has been echoed on the Web.

Yeah, and it’s starting to happen on the right, but up until this current campaign, it’s still been liberal terrain or left-leaning terrain. There are definitely influential right-wing Web sites — I wouldn’t really define the Drudge Report as a blog — but in terms of organizing and activism, the left still holds the advantage. The netroots are media watchdogs too. They counter the right-wing noise machine. They are challenging the mainstream political media, and when they are challenging the Democratic Party, which obviously needs to be challenged on Iraq and many other issues, that is when they are most effective.

It is ironic, then, that the outlet you find to be the most successful as a media watchdog is the one that has become the most mainstream: “The Daily Show.” How is it that “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” have become such huge phenomena but have still kept to what you see as the spirit of the “new blue media”?

Because they are asking the questions that the mainstream political media won’t. They are best seen as ongoing works of media criticism. The very fact that Colbert playing a faux Bill O’Reilly now wields nearly as much influence throughout the political media as the actual Bill O’Reilly shows that there has begun to be a successful counter-attack against the right-wing noise machine.

In the book, you say that you see Colbert’s infamous speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner as the moment that embodies the power of the new media to take down the old one.

It was a great moment. He shook up a roomful of the Beltway media elite, and in the wake of it, the old media led by the Washington Post tried to take him down, and they were overwhelmed by the response from the blogosphere.

You write a lot about the huge success that these nontraditional media outlets have had in capturing audiences, more particularly young, white, educated or at least semi-educated audiences. Though you are generally enthusiastic, you hint at the fact that by presenting themselves as comedians rather than political commentators or media critics, Stewart and Colbert are shirking an intellectual responsibility to deliver concrete ideas or fully explain their positions.

But if you look at some of the conversations that Colbert has with various authors and political figures … I mean, Bernie Sanders was on there a couple of weeks ago making a case for socialism. Where else are you going to find that in the mainstream media? So, yeah, they are not presenting serious policy debate, but the issues that are discussed in the Nation and other progressive outlets turn up in “The Daily Show” and “Colbert” critique.

But in a much fluffier form!

I think there is obviously a need for both. People aren’t going to be fully informed simply by watching these shows, even though for young people, ["The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report"] are increasingly becoming the primary news sources. There is some danger in that, because people do need to be reading other, more serious analyses and different positions. But the success of these outlets also makes candidates recognize that they can’t just give policy issues the typical treatment. They have to actually be accountable and explain why it is they are doing what they’re doing.

But media is not a substitute for politics. I think that the netroots and other organizing that gets people involved are actually more important in some respects than media superstars making the rounds.

In the last chapter, you suggest that the influence of the netroots and the more activist wing of the new blue media would be marginalized in the (increasingly unlikely) case of another Clinton administration, which you characterize as inevitably pro-war and pro-corporate.

Clinton has attacked MoveOn for its organizing capacity, for its ability to turn out volunteers and voters to caucuses. As I show in the book, she’s never been on friendly terms with the blogosphere and generally with the antiwar base of the party, who still won’t forgive her for her vote or trust her. But the interesting thing is that she actually has adopted one of the main styles of the new blue media. To me, in the last few months in particular, she sounds a lot like Howard Dean in 2004, when he was the initial figurehead of the netroots. She’s the combative fighter who, just the other day in North Carolina, was standing up on a pickup truck making her populist appeal. Obama is not coming across as a fighter in that same way, but he is in sync with the interactive nature of the netroots.

What do you mean by “interactive”?

So much of his campaign has been driven by use of the Internet and bringing out volunteers via text messaging and other new technologies. He’s got the whole MySpace/Facebook campaigning thing down, and he’s really succeeded in appealing to youth voters through those means. So two of these styles have emerged in recent years … the fighting Democrat style embodied by Dean and the more interactive, netroots-oriented campaigner.

But in the book it seemed pretty clear that you feel Obama is a better representative of the potential of this new media.

Well sure, because the style is only one component. The substance is important too. I’m showing all along that all of these outlets (except when Al Franken was the figurehead of Air America) have been steadfastly opposed to the Iraq war. So I think that Obama, because of that particular stance, is much more of a fit.

In an Obama presidency, what kind of role do you think the new blue media would play?

Obama is repeatedly stressing that politics flow from the bottom up, not from the top down. And that is the netroots perspective. It’s basically an invitation to maintain pressure from below and keep advancing policy positions.

Why were you personally compelled to write this book right now?

Personally, just having come through the Bush era, I can’t imagine what it would have been like without Jon Stewart, Michael Moore, the Onion, Stephen Colbert and company. It would have been pretty joyless, to say the least, and we probably would have felt powerless without the ability to try to influence the party through the netroots.