And we may ask ourselves (to quote Talking Heads—it’s never not a good time to quote Talking Heads): Well, how did we get here? How did we bring ourselves to this place of howling jeopardy? On the eve of the 2024 vice-presidential debate, with the stakes so terribly high, can we get a bit of context? And could it be presented entertainingly, so we don’t get bored? Allow me to recommend a viewing or re-viewing of Game Change.
But first: Let’s go back. Back through the germ clouds and the sulfur swirls and the windows getting broken with the butts of flagpoles, to a time when we were only half-crazy. Three-quarters crazy, maybe. Let’s go back to the summer of 2008.
Remember 2008? John McCain was the Republican candidate for president. The Democratic candidate was Barack Obama. The Great Backlash was yet to be unleashed; the foaming tides of grievance awaited their arch whipper-up.
McCain versus Obama. Interesting pair of characters, interesting binary moment for the nation: cranky old McCain the war hero, unpredictable, unsteady perhaps, rumbling around the country on the Straight Talk Express (his bus)—and handsome young Obama, the anointed, the noble profile with his arena-swelling cadences. “We are a people of improbable hope … with an eye toward the future!” (Cue hysteria, flashbulbs.) Did he have a bus? Surely he simply hovered, weightless, from rally to rally. And as the summer wore on and convention time neared, it became apparent that Obama was creaming McCain. The polls, they jigged and jagged, the mood of the electorate swung this way and that, but McCain was always behind. Always losing. He had to make a move. He had to shake it up. He had to do something … game-changing.
Game Change dramatizes the reckless hour when McCain picked Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska to be his running mate (“This is a woman with a gun, John!” burbles one of his advisers: “I mean, c’mon! The base is gonna be doing backflips”) and was then obliged to deal with the fallout as it emerged that she didn’t know much about foreign countries or what the Federal Reserve was. Woody Harrelson plays the McCain strategist/bouncer Steve Schmidt, all shoulders and gleaming cranium; Ed Harris plays a rambunctious, foulmouthed, wide-eyed McCain; and Julianne Moore, from a place of truly Strasbergian inwardness, plays Palin.
At the time of its release—2012—Game Change seemed a fairly earnest and didactic, if very well made, piece of entertainment. Framed at beginning and end by Schmidt’s interview with Anderson Cooper (in which a sweating Schmidt is asked, “If you had it to do over again, would you have her on the ticket?”), it seemed pretty clear on the idea that the Palin pick was a disaster, a Faustian bargain with the forces of American irrationality. McCain loses, of course, but right after his super-dignified concession speech, the crowd starts lowing: “Sa-RAH! Sa-RAH!” Something is happening. Palin glows, a radioactive glow. The soundtrack drones with foreboding; the McCain team look around nervously. They can feel the lion’s breath of history on their necks.
Watched now, it feels more complex. Because it’s a movie, a good movie, with an obligation to character and narrative arc and so on, Game Change, almost in spite of itself, gives us a Palin who is rounded and human and likable. Plucked from her Alaskan habitat by the unscrupulous jocks of the McCain campaign, small-town Sarah struggles in the jangling world of prime time. She keeps her family nervously close—even including in her entourage the young man who recently impregnated her daughter out of wedlock. (“Thank you for inviting me, Mrs. Palin.” “Thank you for cutting your mullet, Levi. I really appreciate it.”) Her speech at the Republican National Convention is a smash—she kills it!—and the people out on the road love her, but her political persona is brittle. It does not retain information. It was not built for scrutiny. To the liberal media, she becomes quarry, and you feel for her in the big interviews. You dislike Charlie Gibson and his schoolmasterly frown. Katie Couric circles with a predatory glitter: “When it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious: What newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this?” (“Name one fucking paper!” groans Schmidt.)
Verbally, the movie has two registers, which serve as two opposing discourses. One is the homespun idiom of folksy Sarah: “Hey, Bristol? You hold Trig. I’m gonna take Piper on the roller coaster.” The other is the ultra-secular, sub-Sorkin politico-speak used by the hacks and flacks around McCain. “The data shows we have four things we have to do. We have to win back the independents, we have to excite the base, we have to distance ourselves from the Bush administration, and we have to close the gender gap.” If the “deep state” exists, this is how it talks.
So Game Change, pre-Trump, pre-pandemic, pre–January 6, unknowing as it obviously was of all the weirdness that was coming down the pike, saw quite clearly the cleavage in the American psyche out of which the future—our present!—would emerge. On the runway somewhere on the campaign jet, before the pick is announced, brutal Steve Schmidt is struck by Palin’s equanimity. (She is gazing blissfully out the window.) “You seem totally unfazed by this,” he says. She turns to him: “It’s God’s plan.” And despite the slight glaze of fanaticism on Moore’s face as she says this, and the flash of panic on Harrelson’s, you’re kind of with her. Schmidt, about to ascend to 30,000 feet, doesn’t know that he’s in the hands of God. But Palin does!
McCain-Palin was a tragedy: A great statesman, desperate for the win, succumbed to vanity and made a pact with darkness. That’s one way to look at it. McCain-Palin was a comedy: A flailing candidate, wrecked on his own ego, made a ludicrous decision, and it all blew up in his face. That’s another way to look at it. Game Change sort of splits the difference: McCain-Palin was a movie, soapy but terribly consequential, and we still don’t know how it’s going to end.
