Hollywood loses the plot over an age-old problem

A legendary director says age can be a strength. But unlike rock and roll and the movies politics doesn’t allow retakes.

Mick Jagger and wife Melanie Hamrick on the red carpet in New York last week. Picture: AFP

President Joe Biden has a problem. In the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, his favourable rating is 42.5 per cent.

The specifics look worse: his job approval on foreign affairs is 40.7 per cent, on the economy 38.3 per cent, on crime 37.3 per cent, on immigration 33 per cent, and on inflation 32.6 per cent. To top it off, former president Donald Trump, who’s been indicted twice, leads Biden 44.1 per cent to 43.5 per cent.

Don’t worry, Democrats. Hollywood is riding to the rescue! In addition to being DreamWorks Animation’s CEO and a movie-making legend, Jeffrey Katzenberg is one of the Biden campaign’s seven national co-chairmen. Now he and George Clooney have messaging advice for Team Biden – turn the President’s greatest weakness into his strength.

Though a May ABC poll found that 68 per cent of Americans think Biden, who will turn 82 shortly after the 2024 election, is too old to be president, Katzenberg suggests that Biden embrace his age as evidence of wisdom and maturity and respond to questions about it with humour.

If Harrison Ford at 80 can star in the new Indiana Jones movie (Dial of Destiny is out this Friday) and Mick Jagger can celebrate six decades with the Rolling Stones by strutting across concert stages singing Start Me Up, why should Biden’s age hold him back?

The President can run in the mould of Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars or Sean Connery as John Patrick Mason in The Rock, a man whose years and evident abilities have made him a wise and reliable badass. Or so the theory runs.

In my political consulting years, I liked finding how an ­opposing candidate’s supposed strength was really a weakness. It’s an interesting twist to emphasise an obvious weakness in an ­attempt to flip it to a positive. But what works in showbiz doesn’t ­always work in politics.

Harrison Ford at the UK Premiere of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in London on Monday. Picture: AFP

Some 80-year-olds still have what it takes to film a movie, but Biden can’t rely on retakes or ­editing. He has no computer-­generated imagery or stunt ­doubles. Voters can see his increasing difficulty in communicating and his growing frailty.

Nor can Biden rely on the familiarity of performing the same song and concert routine he’s done for a lifetime. As president, every day brings new challenges, different problems, unfamiliar settings and unrelenting pressure.

There are leaders sharp as a tack at 100 (think Henry Kiss­inger). But Biden’s age problem isn’t that it’s merely a GOP talking point; it’s reality. It’s simply a fact that the President isn’t at the top of his game, or close to it. His ­utterances often generate concern, even among supporters. There’s no reason to think things will get better and every reason to believe they’ll get worse.

Katzenberg and Clooney’s ­advice might work if life were a ­little more like television and movies, in which voters are often depicted as easily misled by convoluted political theatrics.

Take The Candidate (1972), starring Robert Redford as Bill McKay, an idealistic environmental lawyer recruited to challenge a popular California Republican senator. Guided by a Machiavellian consultant, McKay is told to trim his views and offer voters ­pablum. Aided by a sleazy union boss and boosted by the endorsement of his estranged father, a ­respected former governor, McKay wins. It’s all artifice and fraud. “What do we do now?” is the movie’s final line.

This idea is taken to an ­extreme in Wag the Dog (1997). A political operative played by Robert De Niro and a Hollywood producer depicted by Dustin Hoffman concoct a fake war in ­Albania to distract attention from the president sexually assaulting a teenage girl in the Oval Office two weeks before the election. The bogus war diverts the public from the president’s scandal long enough for him to win. (Spoiler alert: De Niro orders Hoffman killed at the end.)

Such scripts make for popular movies, but they’re the wrong way to view a real presidential election. Voters are hardly perfect and sometimes make mistakes. But in general, the story that comes closest to real life is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. By a presidential campaign’s end, as with the emperor at the parade’s conclusion, many swing voters sense when they’re being conned and see through it. Trying to run an entire presidential campaign on a false narrative is a prescription for disaster.

Biden’s deterioration is a difficult problem. Katzenberg and Clooney won’t solve it unless they manage to cast him as Benjamin Button.

The Wall Street Journal

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