Actors, Politics and Elections: Perception and Reality

Oh, those conservatives! How they hate Jane Fonda (so do I), George Clooney (not so much) and Alec Baldwin (maybe a little). Hollywood is filled with liberal actors who go around spouting their politics as if they have both the right and the ability. As we all know, all actors are liberal woolly-heads who should far more time on the set than on the soapbox and the only people who listen to these actors are equally liberal voters.

Right?

I’m going to give you three names and see if you can guess what they have in common. Ronald Reagan. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sonny Bono.

Three actors. Well, okay, three people who stood up in front of a camera and read lines from a script as they enacted a fictional story. Nobody is going to confuse any of the above with Cagney, Clift or Cheadle. But they were all bona fide stars in their own way at one time or another. And they were all duly elected to pretty impressive positions. Two Governors of California, a Congressman and a President. Not too shabby.

And hey, here’s something else: They were all elected as Republicans. Anybody notice something odd about that? Every conservative pundit from O’Reilly to Carlson, from Scarborough to the big fat idiot has wasted literally hours of breath complaining about how actors use their status to spread their liberal points of view.

News flash: The Democrats have yet to nominate an actor for President. Or for Governor of a major state, for that matter. Rank and file Republicans have yet to line up at the voting booth to send an actor to the most powerful political positions in the largest state in the union. The perception is that the only actors who speak out on issues at length are Democrats.

The freaking NRA elected an actor as its leader! The most wholesale conservative group in the country elected an actor as their national spokesman! Not the ACLU, the National Rifle Association.

When George Clooney speaks out against Bush, the right-wingers immediately set to work on how he should just stick to speaking the words written in a script and leave politics alone. These people then turn around and campaign for a movie star who can barely speak intelligible English to get a second term as Governor of a state facing the problem of immigration by thousands of people who can speak English better than he does!

Perception wins out over reality again. The perception is that only Democratic actors speak out and get involved in politics. The reality is that only Republican actors have ever been elected to positions of true power. Why is that people continue to believe the myths put forward by conservatives?

A liberal media? Let’s see, every media outlet in America is owned by a multibillion dollar international conglomerate. Yeah, GE, News Corp., Time Warner and Disney have a huge history of liberal treatment of their workers and consumers.

The GOP is tough on terrorism? Yeah, they had nine months to ferret out the fact that over a dozen men were learning to fly but not land planes.

Only liberal actors are involved in politics? Pres. Reagan. Gov. Schwarzenegger. Rep. Bono.

What’s next? Sec. of Defense Bruce Willis?

Well, I guess he couldn’t be any worse than Don Rumsfailure.