Notes From D. R.

Weekend Box Office: Old Money

10,000 BC tops the charts.

Minds Only Work Best When Open

As William F. Buckley once put it, some Democrats claim they want to hear other views...and then they're shocked to learn that other views exist!

Lord Love A Duck

You'd figure some conservatives would think twice about beating up on John McCain right now, wouldn't you?

Don't Call It A Comeback

Barack Obama wins the Wyoming Caucuses.

Steele Industry

Could Michael Steele hold the key to a John McCain victory in November?

If Hillary Clinton surreptitiously seizes the Democrat Presidential nomination and then denies Barack Obama the Vice Presidential slot, Clinton could end up alienating black voters. Black Democrats are already upset by Clinton’s questionable actions in the primary; if Clinton is perceived as having robbed Obama of the nomination, these Democrats could have second and third thoughts about supporting Clinton in the fall.

Could McCain lure these disaffected Democrats by selecting Maryland’s former lieutenant governor as his running mate? In theory, no. Black voters have been at odds with the GOP ever since Barry Goldwater stupidly refused to support the 1964 Civil Rights Act; the controversy over President Bush’s response to the destruction in New Orleans three years ago has seemingly intensified black anti-GOP sentiment.

Yet theory is not fact, and disaffected black Democrats would not necessarily scorn a McCain-Steele ticket. Neither man is solidly conservative—and while McCain and Steele’s “moderation” on certain issues may make them somewhat unpalatable to the GOP base, their lack of ideological rigidity could help them attract skeptical black voters.

It can be argued that black Democrats are not so much turned off by the Republican Party per se as they are turned off by conservatism. After all, how many black voters had issues with liberal Republican Edward Brooke when he was a member of the US Senate?

Black Democrats tend to distrust right-wing politics, viewing conservatism as the value system of social Darwinism and hardheartedness towards the less fortunate. Presented with two Republicans who are not down-the-line conservatives—two Republicans who have been, in fact, at odds on a number of occasions with the GOP right—it’s hard to see alienated black Democrats not considering a vote for the Republican ticket.

Steele may be a Reagan admirer, but he has strongly criticized his own party in the past for dropping the ball when it comes to reaching out to black voters. He has also argued against abandoning public-sector affirmative action programs, a position that puts him to the left of Clarence Thomas (and black Democrats will not consider voting for a Republican who is not to the left of Clarence Thomas). In addition, he has raised questions about the racial fairness of capital punishment.

Both McCain and Steele are mavericks, not willing to automatically embrace doctrinaire conservatism. The GOP base may have some concerns about voting for a McCain-Steele ticket; however, this pairing could well be the first GOP ticket in a long time to appeal to black Democrat voters.

It’s long been forgotten, but the Bob Dole-Jack Kemp ticket actually yielded twelve percent of the national black vote in 1996—more than what George W. Bush received in either 2000 or 2004. Dole and Kemp were not “hardcore conservatives”: in fact, Kemp embraced Bill Clinton’s mend-it-don’t-end-it approach to public sector affirmative action programs. Clearly, black voters gave the Dole-Kemp ticket such a “high” level of support because neither man on the ticket was a right-winger.

In a way, it’s sad that a McCain-Steele ticket can only appeal to disaffected black Democrats due to the potential ticket’s lack of conservatism. The left has made the very concept of Reagan-style conservatism taboo among black voters by rhetorically linking right-wing politics to Jim Crow and opposition to legal equality. It’s a distortion of history—plenty of conservative Republican lawmakers worked with Democrats to ensure passage of the Civil Rights Act—but the conservative-as-bigot theme has taken hold, leading many black voters to dismiss the Republicans as a potential voting option.

Because they are not strict conservatives, McCain and Steele will be able to reach black Democrats disturbed by a Clinton coup. Black Democrat unease with the GOP is borne of a belief, however shortsighted, that right-wing politics are not truly beneficial to communities of color. McCain and Steele are nominally Republicans, but neither man fully subscribes to the party’s ideology—an ideology that black Democrats are troubled by.

Under the right circumstances, a McCain-Steele ticket could attract the largest black GOP vote since the Nixon-Lodge ticket in 1960. It will not represent the start of a permanent political realignment; many of these voters could well return to the Democrats in 2012. Yet a one-time shift of a significant number of black votes to the GOP will be all that is needed to force a Clinton general-election loss—one that disaffected black Democrats will regard as poetic justice for the woman who wronged a wunderkind.

No Holds Barred

Peggy Noonan on the Democrat civil war.

"Oh, McCain, You're So Fine, You're So Fine You Blow My Mind..."

President Bush endorses John McCain. If the economy improves, and Iraq remains stable, this won't be as damaging in the fall as it presumably is now. More from Armstrong Williams.

Cast Your Fate To The Wind

Hillary Clinton wins in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island, while Barack Obama wins in Vermont. Meanwhile, John McCain captures the GOP nomination, and Mike Huckabee abandons his Presidential bid. More from Fred Barnes, Howie Carr, Jennifer Rubin, Jed Babbin and Ericka Andersen.

Write It Down

A bizarre controversy involving the Boston Globe.

Walk A Thin Line

A little common sense could have saved New Line Cinema.

The forty-year-old film studio effectively died last week, when Time Warner announced that New Line (which had been owned by Time Warner since the mid-1990s) would be turned into a de facto production company and that Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, who founded the studio, would be relieved of their duties. The end of New Line is devastating news for those of us who enjoyed the studio’s offbeat product: like Miramax Films, New Line became famous for producing movies outside of the traditional Hollywood format.

New Line gave us A Nightmare on Elm Street, Rush Hour, House Party, Menace II Society, Boogie Nights, Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, Hulk Hogan in No Holds Barred, Austin Powers, About Schmidt, Friday, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Snakes on a Plane. It was a studio for the unusual, the eccentric, the out-of-nowhere. What other studio would make a Robert De Niro film like 15 Minutes, a Johnny Depp film like Blow, an Adam Sandler film like Punch-Drunk Love?

New Line reached its peak with the Lord of the Rings series, three box-office hits that established the studio as an entity capable of both artistic and financial victories. So what happened?

The studio, which has had few post-Rings successes, dropped the ball right through the floor with the decision to produce The Golden Compass, the first film in a planned trilogy based on Philip Pullman’s pro-atheism children’s novels. Compass did well outside of the United States, but New Line did not reap the financial benefits because the studio sold off foreign rights to offset the film’s monumental budget. In order to turn a profit, Compass needed to be a tremendous success in the United States. However, it only grossed $70 million in this country, thus making the film the Heaven’s Gate of the 2000s.

Looking back, it’s impossible to understand why New Line thought the film would be an American hit. Pullman’s books had been criticized for years for mocking Christianity: it was inevitable that the movie would be attacked in America on the same grounds. So why did New Line even bother producing the film? Did Shaye and Lynne assume that the American religious right had lost all influence, and thus could not possibly affect the film’s domestic performance?

From a business perspective, hoping that Compass would become a domestic hit made no sense.  America has a large Christian population. Not all of these Christians are conservative, but many of them are quite concerned about the way Christianity is treated by the popular culture.

These Christians went to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in overwhelming numbers four years ago because they believed a positive treatment of Christianity in Hollywood was long overdue. When these Christians learned that Compass was based on a series of novels attacking Christianity, they apparently decided not to bother seeing the picture.

Perhaps the success of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code convinced Shaye and Lynne that Americans would see a film based on a novel mocking religious belief. This was the wrong conclusion to draw. The Da Vinci Code was a phenomenon that played by its own rules, exploiting America’s fondness for conspiracy far more than it exploited America’s desire for atheism. The success of Brown’s book did not necessarily mean that Americans would line up to see a movie based on a similarly controversial literary work.

I will resist the urge to attack Shaye and Lynne as Hollywood secularists intent on mocking traditional values. They are brilliant businessmen who built a studio up from nothing and became entertainment titans in the process. Say what you will about individual New Line movies, but both men were ultimately a force for good from a creative standpoint.

Yet they clearly made a mistake by deciding to produce Compass, and one has to wonder if their decision was based in part on being isolated from certain aspects of American culture. Do Shaye and Lynne know anyone with red-state tastes and sensibilities? If they did, perhaps they would have figured out, before it was too late, that it was impossible for a film with Compass’ pedigree to be a domestic success.

It’s interesting that Shaye and Lynne also decided to produce the 2007 dud Rendition, a film strongly critical of President Bush’s antiterrorism efforts. Rendition is another example of a film that simply would not have been made if Shaye and Lynne understood that not everyone in the United States views things the way folks in Hollywood do. Who did they think was the target audience for that particular film?

I feel sorry for Shaye, Lynne, the New Line executives and employees who are about to be displaced, and movie lovers who embraced New Line as one of the few studios that provided something different. I feel sorry for them, because a crucial misjudgment on the part of New Line has led to the studio’s self-destruction.

Gold Mind

Bill Kristol on William F. Buckley.