Which part of the entertainment industry has clout in Washington? Hint: Not Hollywood

With Jack Valenti having passed on to that great multiplex in the sky, where he's no doubt regaling the Good Lord with gaudy tales of working in the White House with Lyndon Johnson and running Hollywood with Lew Wasserman, the Motion Picture Assn. of America no longer has the great insider's clout in Washington that Valenti provided for nearly 40 years. In fact, rumors abound that Valenti's successor, MPAA chief Dan Glickman, may already be on the way out, in part because of his lack of influence with Washington politicians, who didn't give Hollywood its much sought-after tax break in the recent stimulus package. 

On the other hand, the music business seems to have the new Obama administration right where it wants it -- in the palm of its hand. It's a subject that seems to have escaped the attention of most mainstream media. But Wired, which has done some great reporting on this issue lately, reveals in its latest post that President Obama has now hired (count 'em) five Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA) attorneys to fill Justice Department positions. I know that Hollywood figures it has the president's ear, with Ari Emanuel's brother Rahm being White House chief of staff, but if you want to fight those pesky music pirates and downloaders, it sure is nice to have a host of big-shot lawyers inside the Justice Department.

The latest hire is Ian Gershengorn, who becomes the Justice Department's deputy assistant attorney of the civil division. He was at the RIAA firm Jenner & Block, which represented the record biz against Grokster. As Wired reports, he "will be in the charge of the DOJ Federal Programs Branch. That's the unit that just told a federal judge the Obama administration supports monetary damages as high as $150,000 per purloined music track on a peer-to-peer file sharing program.

Other Department of Justice hires from Jenner & Block include Tom Perrilli, now the department's No. 2 man; Donald Verrilli, now the department's No. 3 man; Brian Hauck, counsel to associate attorney general; and Ginger Anders, assistant to the solicitor general. Nearly two dozen public interest groups and library coalitions recently urged the president to quit filling the administration with RIAA lawyers. So far, it seems, their complaints have fallen on deaf ears. 

Photo of Dan Glickman by Jae C. Hong / Associated Press

I know it sounds like a belated April Fool's joke, but apparently it's true. As Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello reports today, Kal Penn is leaving his acting career behind to go to work in the White House. That's right, instead of doing a follow-up to "Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay," Penn is leaving his regular gig on Fox's hit series "House" behind to join the Obama administration as associate director in the White House office of public liaison.

As you can tell by that job description, it's not exactly a glamour job -- he's actually going to be a real live low-level White House staffer. As Penn explains, people in his new post "do outreach with the American public and with different organizations. They're basically the front door of the White House. They take out all of the red tape that falls between the general public and the White House."

It turns out that Penn is supremely overqualified to be spending all his waking hours on a TV or film set, gossiping about the latest box-office hit or sharing the details about his latest bowel movement on Twitter. He says that even as a kid, he spent as much time taking "dorky" political science classes as performing in school theater shows. "It's probably because of the value system my grandparents instilled in me," he says. "They marched with Gandhi in the Indian independence movement and that was always in the back of my head.... In 2006, I started this international studies program at Stanford, where they actually let you do most of the course work online. So it was something I could do while I was acting. I thought this might be the right time to go off and do something else."

There are thousands of actors in Hollywood with strong political opinions and passions, but it's always refreshing to see someone willing to put their money where their mouth is, since Penn acknowledges that he'll be taking quite a big pay cut in his new job. "There's not a lot of financial reward in these jobs," he says. "But obviously the opportunity to serve in a capacity like this is an incredible honor."

I was so impressed by Penn's idealism that I almost forgot he was being interviewed by Entertainment Weekly until EW's Ausiello jolted me out of my reverie by steering the interview back to more pressing concerns. Referring to a recent plot development in the "House" series, he asked Penn: "Aren't you bummed you won't be around to experience firsthand the fallout from Cuddy and House having sex?"

Already sounding like a discreet low-level White House staffer, Penn replied: "Do they really?"      

The Bush administration wasn't actually secretly trying to prevent liberal activist Tim Robbins from voting for president last Tuesday. If you missed it, Robbins got into a noisy argument with a polling worker after no one could find his name on the rolls of registered voters at his local polling place in New York, even though the actor said he'd been voting at the same location for years. But according to a report from Access Hollywood picked up by MSNBC, Robbins, ahem, went to the wrong polling place.

The New York City Board of Elections wrote the actor a letter saying he should have voted at a library on West 20th Street, not the YMCA on West 14th Street where he and Susan Sarandon turned up to vote. It's pretty evident from the sly tone of the letter that the election board was getting its revenge for being portrayed by Robbins in various news reports as a cloddish bureaucratic sinkhole. "It would appear, based on a review of your voter registration history, that your voting experience was less than positive because you simply went to the wrong poll site," an election board member wrote, coolly sticking the knife in by adding that if there was confusion over the appropriate voting location, it might be because "you have not voted in an recent election, including the presidential primary in February 2008 and the party primary in September 2008."

Ouch! Is it really possible that Robbins, who seems to speak out more on American foreign policy than, well, most U.S. senators, didn't actually vote in the pivotal New York presidential primary? OMG! Wait till Dirty Harry, my favorite right-wing, Robbins-loathing blogger, hears about this--it'll make his day!

But wait--Robbins isn't taking this lying down. He disputes the election board's claims, saying it's a PR stunt "to try to cover their butts over their ineptitude." He says he voted as his regular polling place in both 2004 and 2006--and has a copy of his voter registration clearly showing his home address. "Something doesn't [jibe] with the actions of the Board of Elections," he told Access Hollywood. "For no good reason, they chose to take this active voter off the voting rolls." Robbins says he is examining legal options, saying the board's release of his personal information is "an invasion of privacy and further insult."

Stay tuned. Somehow I think this election dispute may last longer than Gore vs. Bush 2000.

RELATED:

Robbins Argues with Polling Workers on Election Day

Photo of Tim Robbins by Los Angeles Times

David Geffen is no dummy. When I called him today, he knew exactly what I wanted to talk about: "Maureen's column, right?" he said before I could finish a sentence. I guess you don't get to be a fabulously successful media mogul without having a sixth sense of what on someone's mind, whether they're a famous filmmaker or a tongue-tied reporter.

When historians start looking for turning points in the trajectory of the Obama campaign for the presidency, they will inevitably turn to Feb. 21, 2007, the day that the New York Times' Maureen Dowd ran a column where Geffen blasted then-Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. He didn't just say he disliked Hillary, he dismissed her as "the easiest [candidate] to beat." He called Hillary overproduced and overscripted. "It's not a very big thing to say, 'I made a mistake' on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't."

Geffen added that after eight years of George W. Bush as president, "I don't think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is--and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton--can bring the country together." Geffen's indictment of Clinton caused a firestorm. It's easy to forget that back in the winter of 2007, Hillary wasn't just the front runner--she was considered inevitable. The entire Clinton campaign was based on a sense of her invincibility. Clinton operatives were telling deep-pocket party supporters--you better sign on now. The train is leaving the station and you don't want it leaving without you.

Geffen broke the spell. Having soured on the Clintons after raising huge sums of money for Bill and sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom--twice--Geffen found himself enamored of Obama from the first time he saw him on TV, giving a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "I thought he was a remarkable guy," Geffen told me today. "After I heard him give that speech, I called him up and said, 'You're going to run for president and I'm going to support you.' " Geffen says Obama laughed and said he was very flattered, but that he wasn't running.

Cut to two years later. "He called me one day and said with a laugh, ' David, I guess you're right. I am running for president and I'd like your support.' And of course, I said, 'You have it.' "

What is the private Obama like? And how did Dowd get Geffen to finally go public with his complaints about Hillary? Keep reading:

This stuff never happens to Arnold Schwarzenegger. When Tim Robbins went to his local polling place today at the 14th Street YMCA in Manhattan, no one could find his name in the rolls of registered voters, even though he'd been voting at the same location for years. According to TMZ, an argument erupted after Robbins was told he'd have to fill out a provisional ballot. "Robbins allegedly got loud and the poll worker said he was calling the cops. Robbins accused the poll worker of trying to intimidate him so he wouldn't vote."

Of course, the right-wing press has been having a field day with this nugget, with the New York Post snarkily describing the actor as "liberal poster boy Tim Robbins" and quoting a poll worker as saying Robbins was "obnoxious." Dirty Harry's blog tagged the story "Snit Alert." It's not exactly news that conservatives loathe Robbins--they're always complaining about how his activism makes it impossible for any patriotic moviegoer to enjoy his films. But if you watch the TMZ video for yourself, you'll see that Robbins is unbelievably gentlemanly toward the TMZ reporter, patiently explaining his voting difficulties, before urging him to go off and vote himself. Maybe my conservative blogger pals are extra cranky today, with the polls painting a bleak picture for election night, but if they want to stereotype a Hollywood actor as a dilettante, they'll have to do better than this.

Photo of Tim Robbins by Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times

Maybe it was the retro feel of the ancient elementary school where I went to vote this morning, maybe it was seeing my wife take our 10-year-old into the voting booth and letting him punch the tab next to Barack Obama's name, but I had a massive attack of nostalgia wandering around Broxton Elementary's auditorium, thinking about the first time I voted as a teenager in Chicago. It was the 1970s and the city was still ruled by Richard J. Daley, father of the current longtime mayor, and known to all as Hizzoner, or just Da Mare.

The Chicago of today that helped propel Obama to the brink of the presidency is a very different place -- gentrified, yuppified, full of white-collar professionals, with trendy coffee bars on practically every corner. Back then, Chicago was still a working-class town with a political machine that delivered votes the old fashioned way. As the old maxim held, in Chicago you voted early and often. On election day, the winos would stumble into the polling place, pull the Democratic lever and get a bottle of muscatel. The blacks on the South Side voted Democratic and came home with a chicken. The white lower-income families voted Democratic, safe in the knowledge that Daley would make sure none of those loyal African American voters ever moved into their neighborhood.

In Chicago, politics mattered. As a snot-nosed college kid, I was always voting for some reform candidate, supporting the local alderman who bucked Daley's machine. But Da Mare had a very instructive way of reminding voters of the price of disloyalty. In November, not long after election day, Chicago would invariably have its first big snowstorm. And if you lived in a district represented by a maverick alderman, you could tell exactly where his district began and the machine's district ended, because that's where the snow plows would stop. Da Mare's streets were squeaky clean, your street was 8 inches deep with snow. It was a better lesson than anything I learned in Political Science 101.   

I live today on the Westside of Los Angeles, which is just as loyal a Democratic stronghold as Chicago was then -- and is now. When I go jogging around Santa Monica, I see Obama signs in front of a house on every block, Obama bumper stickers on hundreds of cars. Some things never change. I remember as a kid, driving out to the West Side of Chicago, seeing endless blocks of row houses, each one with a placard in the front window, saying "Re-Elect Mayor Daley." He was elected six times in all, but since I'm going all nostalgic today, I thought I'd let you read an excerpt from "Boss," the late Mike Royko's classic Daley biography that offers a memorable account of Daley's political rule of the Second City.

Perhaps the best chapter details Daley's 1963 reelection campaign, when he was challenged by a local crusader named Ben Adamowski who'd been investigating various scandals in the Daley administration. If Obama wins tonight, he will be propelled to victory, in part, by an enormous turnout in the African American community. Forty-five years ago it was Daley who rode the coattails of the black vote. But as Royko makes clear, we live in a different world today. The black vote in Chicago 45 years ago served a machine politician who epitomized the triumph of the status quo. Today the black vote goes to a candidate who has made change the fundamental cause of his campaign.

UPDATE: Talk about a small Chicago world: When reporters staked out Obama's local polling place--the Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School--waiting for the candidate to arrive, guess who showed up to vote? Bill Ayers!

But as I was saying, oh boy, there was nothing like a political campaign with Daley at the top of the ticket. How did the Daley machine triumph on election day? Keep reading:

Four years ago, in the days leading up to the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry election, I staged a debate between a Hollywood liberal and a Hollywood conservative in one of the back rooms of the Sony commissary. As they say at the U.N., they had a frank exchange of views; the charges and countercharges were flying. And even though I'm a liberal, I have to admit that if I were scoring it like a heavyweight fight, I'd have to say--perhaps as a portent of things to come that year--that the conservative won by a knockout.

The conservative was Michael De Luca, a former production chief at New Line who's now an independent producer, having made such recent films as "Ghost Rider" and "The Love Guru." Born in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, De Luca had been a moderate Democrat until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The muscular Republican response to terrorism won him over, prompting him to pick Bush over Kerry in 2004. He's also been a longtime admirer of John McCain. But no longer.

"I'm inching toward Obama," he told me today. "There isn't anything unique about me. If you look at what Colin Powell has said and Peggy Noonan and Christopher Hitchens, you'll see this is a bigger thing with people who believe in the ideals of the Republican party, but are disgusted by what's happened during the past four years. After the Justice Department scandal, the Katrina [mess] ups, the Plame scandal, all of the catering to the religious right, this is about the narrowing of appeal for the entire Republican party. It feels like a collapse of a conservative movement that goes all the way back to Barry Goldwater. It's a perfect storm that is driving moderates like myself out of the party."

Like producer Eric Gold, the onetime McCain supporter who announced his support for Obama this morning, De Luca isn't starry-eyed about the Democratic challenger. "But after watching the debates, I think Obama has the temperament to sit in the Oval Office, which isn't something you feel as sure about with McCain. I worry that McCain today is more in league with the lunatic fringe of the right than Obama is with the lunatic fringe of the left."

De Luca certainly hasn't been swayed to Obama by any of his Hollywood liberal pals. Au contraire. "All they do is scream about Sarah Palin. I'm sure they'd happily embrace a socialist government. They basically have the Janeane Garofalo point of view, which seems to be that Republicans should be put in jail for being Republicans." He laughs. "I keep telling 'em, 'Shut up! If you want my vote, don't open your mouth. I'm almost there.' "

Having had a number of lively political debates with De Luca over the years, I asked him to write an essay about his anguish over this election. Call it "The Thoughts of a Conflicted Conservative." It's a good read, especially for Hollywood liberals who live in such an insular lefty world that they rarely get to hear a thoughtful conservative point of view. Here's De Luca's take on why he's having trouble sticking with the GOP ticket:

As we head into the final week of the presidential campaign, it's becoming apparent that Sarah Palin may have solidified John McCain's appeal with his GOP base, but the VP pick has wreaked havoc with McCain's support -- such as it is -- in Hollywood. I was just on the phone with manager-producer Eric Gold, who handles Jim Carrey and Ellen DeGeneres, who had been a longtime McCain supporter and contributor, going back to McCain's quixotic 2000 presidential campaign. Thing is, Gold just cast his absentee ballot -- for Barack Obama. What makes Gold's conversion especially revealing is that he is hardly an Obama admirer.

"Obama has done nothing," Gold says. "He has no real experience. I mean, being a community organizer and running for president -- who are we kidding? In the debates, he said nothing -- less than nothing. He's just selling temperament." But after McCain picked Palin as his VP, Gold, who calls himself a "disenfranchised Democrat," began to sour on his longtime political hero. (As have other McCain supporters.)

"If McCain had picked Lindsey Graham or Joe Lieberman, I'd probably be voting differently," says Gold. "But to pick someone of such lightweight proportions as Sarah Palin, that was the nail in the coffin. What he did by picking her was say: I'll do anything to win. He didn't care about the moderates or the independents, which unfortunately meant he didn't care about me. The real John McCain would never have done that. He went against his own principles."

Gold says that for years he stood up for McCain in a hostile environment -- liberal Hollywood. "Obviously this is a town that's not very sympathetic to Republicans," he says. "But his pandering, first with Palin, then with the speeches about Obama being a pal of terrorists, it wasn't worthy of McCain, the guy who was a different kind of Republican. All my liberal friends would say: This is the guy you're standing up for? I was embarrassed. I have lots of doubts about Obama, but everything John McCain has done in the past two months has just driven me back to the Democratic Party."

Gold is not the only McCain fan beginning to break ranks with the Republican candidate over his Palin pick and campaign tactics. Later today I'll be posting an essay from another prominent Hollywood McCain supporter -- who voted for George Bush in 2004 -- who's finding it hard to pull the GOP lever this time around. Stay tuned.

RELATED:

Do Republicans run dirtier campaigns than Democrats?

The 2008 Election: Casting the Hollywood movie

Gasp! Right-wing media bashes 'American Carol'!

Photo of John McCain by Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, the two dark wizards of hardball politics, have already been the subject of documentaries detailing all of their shrewd election strategies and dirty tricks. Now writer-director Billy Ray, who directed the compelling film "Shattered Glass," has a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a film about Allen Raymond, the GOP political operative who actually went to jail after being convicted of conspiracy charges after jamming the phones at Democratic headquarters in the middle of a hotly contested 2002 New Hampshire senatorial race. (The Democratic candidate lost by roughly 20,000 votes.)

Ray has written a script based on Raymond's recently published memoir, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." He's beginning the process of casting the film, working with a contingent of producers who include Generate partner Pete Aronson, who was Raymond's college roommate and encouraged Raymond to write about his experiences. I immediately called up Ray, because if his take on political chicanery is half as fascinating as "Shattered Glass' " portrait of media fabrication, then we might be in for quite a ride.

One thing that fascinated me about Raymond's story is that, like Atwater, he was a mercenary. As  "Boogieman," the new Atwater documentary reveals, Atwater wasn't a die-hard conservative--he turned to Republican causes early on because in the South in the 1960s, the GOP was the party out of power, offering more opportunities for an ambitious young operative; likewise with Raymond, who came from a family of Democrats. "He had no particular political leanings," says Ray. "It was pure ambition. The job and the money was with the Republicans, so that's where he went. He wasn't a holy warrior, just a bright, extremely competitive guy who wanted to climb the corporate ladder."

If you think about it, it's a universal movie character, whether it's Charlie Sheen in "Wall Street" or Ray Liotta in "GoodFellas" or, to use Ray's example, Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer." "He's a guy whose lost his moral rudder," says Ray. "In my script, while the narrative engine is the world of politics, the pulse of the movie is personal. This is a guy who loses his family and the only way to get them back is by regaining his integrity."

It was Atwater who invented the black art of push polling. Raymond took that deception one step further. When he wanted to influence voters in white ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, Raymond would hire an African American voice actor, get him to use his most thuggish ghetto voice and record phone messages, pretending to be a Democratic operative trying to get voters to support a Democratic candidate while, of course, preying on the bias of the person receiving the call. Ray says John McCain is guilty of similar tactics, citing his recent ads portraying Barack Obama's support of a bill educating youngsters on dealing with sexual predators as actually touting sex education for toddlers.

I know what my conservative friends would say: When Hollywood tells a story about campaign dirty tricks, why is it always the Republicans who are always at fault? Sure, the Democrats have gone down to defeat again and again with weak-kneed softies like Bob Shrum running their campaigns, but don't the Democrats play hardball too? Isn't this yet another example of Hollywood bias? Ray didn't flinch. "That's a completely fair criticism," he says. "There have definitely been more movies made about Republican corruption than Democratic corruption. But based on my research and experience, Republicans do it more, do it more effectively and do it without conscience." Why? "Because they believe that their cause is so just that, in a larger sense, any attempt to secure or hold onto power is justified."

Ray insists his script is fair-minded. "I did the reporting. I haven't embellished or manufactured anything. I'm just telling the story and I'll let people judge for themselves." The movie hopes to start production next year, but with a hotly contested election in its final days, I'd be eager to hear your take on the question: Is Hollywood biased against Republicans or do they just step over the line more often than Democrats?   

Photo of Billy Ray by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Kal Penn: From Guantanamo Bay to the White House

I know it sounds like a belated April Fool's joke, but apparently it's true. As Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello reports today, Kal Penn is leaving his acting career behind to go to work in the White House. That's right, instead of doing a follow-up to "Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay," Penn is leaving his regular gig on Fox's hit series "House" behind to join the Obama administration as associate director in the White House office of public liaison.

As you can tell by that job description, it's not exactly a glamour job -- he's actually going to be a real live low-level White House staffer. As Penn explains, people in his new post "do outreach with the American public and with different organizations. They're basically the front door of the White House. They take out all of the red tape that falls between the general public and the White House."

It turns out that Penn is supremely overqualified to be spending all his waking hours on a TV or film set, gossiping about the latest box-office hit or sharing the details about his latest bowel movement on Twitter. He says that even as a kid, he spent as much time taking "dorky" political science classes as performing in school theater shows. "It's probably because of the value system my grandparents instilled in me," he says. "They marched with Gandhi in the Indian independence movement and that was always in the back of my head.... In 2006, I started this international studies program at Stanford, where they actually let you do most of the course work online. So it was something I could do while I was acting. I thought this might be the right time to go off and do something else."

There are thousands of actors in Hollywood with strong political opinions and passions, but it's always refreshing to see someone willing to put their money where their mouth is, since Penn acknowledges that he'll be taking quite a big pay cut in his new job. "There's not a lot of financial reward in these jobs," he says. "But obviously the opportunity to serve in a capacity like this is an incredible honor."

I was so impressed by Penn's idealism that I almost forgot he was being interviewed by Entertainment Weekly until EW's Ausiello jolted me out of my reverie by steering the interview back to more pressing concerns. Referring to a recent plot development in the "House" series, he asked Penn: "Aren't you bummed you won't be around to experience firsthand the fallout from Cuddy and House having sex?"

Already sounding like a discreet low-level White House staffer, Penn replied: "Do they really?"      

The Bush administration wasn't actually secretly trying to prevent liberal activist Tim Robbins from voting for president last Tuesday. If you missed it, Robbins got into a noisy argument with a polling worker after no one could find his name on the rolls of registered voters at his local polling place in New York, even though the actor said he'd been voting at the same location for years. But according to a report from Access Hollywood picked up by MSNBC, Robbins, ahem, went to the wrong polling place.

The New York City Board of Elections wrote the actor a letter saying he should have voted at a library on West 20th Street, not the YMCA on West 14th Street where he and Susan Sarandon turned up to vote. It's pretty evident from the sly tone of the letter that the election board was getting its revenge for being portrayed by Robbins in various news reports as a cloddish bureaucratic sinkhole. "It would appear, based on a review of your voter registration history, that your voting experience was less than positive because you simply went to the wrong poll site," an election board member wrote, coolly sticking the knife in by adding that if there was confusion over the appropriate voting location, it might be because "you have not voted in an recent election, including the presidential primary in February 2008 and the party primary in September 2008."

Ouch! Is it really possible that Robbins, who seems to speak out more on American foreign policy than, well, most U.S. senators, didn't actually vote in the pivotal New York presidential primary? OMG! Wait till Dirty Harry, my favorite right-wing, Robbins-loathing blogger, hears about this--it'll make his day!

But wait--Robbins isn't taking this lying down. He disputes the election board's claims, saying it's a PR stunt "to try to cover their butts over their ineptitude." He says he voted as his regular polling place in both 2004 and 2006--and has a copy of his voter registration clearly showing his home address. "Something doesn't [jibe] with the actions of the Board of Elections," he told Access Hollywood. "For no good reason, they chose to take this active voter off the voting rolls." Robbins says he is examining legal options, saying the board's release of his personal information is "an invasion of privacy and further insult."

Stay tuned. Somehow I think this election dispute may last longer than Gore vs. Bush 2000.

RELATED:

Robbins Argues with Polling Workers on Election Day

Photo of Tim Robbins by Los Angeles Times

David Geffen is no dummy. When I called him today, he knew exactly what I wanted to talk about: "Maureen's column, right?" he said before I could finish a sentence. I guess you don't get to be a fabulously successful media mogul without having a sixth sense of what on someone's mind, whether they're a famous filmmaker or a tongue-tied reporter.

When historians start looking for turning points in the trajectory of the Obama campaign for the presidency, they will inevitably turn to Feb. 21, 2007, the day that the New York Times' Maureen Dowd ran a column where Geffen blasted then-Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. He didn't just say he disliked Hillary, he dismissed her as "the easiest [candidate] to beat." He called Hillary overproduced and overscripted. "It's not a very big thing to say, 'I made a mistake' on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't."

Geffen added that after eight years of George W. Bush as president, "I don't think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is--and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton--can bring the country together." Geffen's indictment of Clinton caused a firestorm. It's easy to forget that back in the winter of 2007, Hillary wasn't just the front runner--she was considered inevitable. The entire Clinton campaign was based on a sense of her invincibility. Clinton operatives were telling deep-pocket party supporters--you better sign on now. The train is leaving the station and you don't want it leaving without you.

Geffen broke the spell. Having soured on the Clintons after raising huge sums of money for Bill and sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom--twice--Geffen found himself enamored of Obama from the first time he saw him on TV, giving a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "I thought he was a remarkable guy," Geffen told me today. "After I heard him give that speech, I called him up and said, 'You're going to run for president and I'm going to support you.' " Geffen says Obama laughed and said he was very flattered, but that he wasn't running.

Cut to two years later. "He called me one day and said with a laugh, ' David, I guess you're right. I am running for president and I'd like your support.' And of course, I said, 'You have it.' "

What is the private Obama like? And how did Dowd get Geffen to finally go public with his complaints about Hillary? Keep reading:

This stuff never happens to Arnold Schwarzenegger. When Tim Robbins went to his local polling place today at the 14th Street YMCA in Manhattan, no one could find his name in the rolls of registered voters, even though he'd been voting at the same location for years. According to TMZ, an argument erupted after Robbins was told he'd have to fill out a provisional ballot. "Robbins allegedly got loud and the poll worker said he was calling the cops. Robbins accused the poll worker of trying to intimidate him so he wouldn't vote."

Of course, the right-wing press has been having a field day with this nugget, with the New York Post snarkily describing the actor as "liberal poster boy Tim Robbins" and quoting a poll worker as saying Robbins was "obnoxious." Dirty Harry's blog tagged the story "Snit Alert." It's not exactly news that conservatives loathe Robbins--they're always complaining about how his activism makes it impossible for any patriotic moviegoer to enjoy his films. But if you watch the TMZ video for yourself, you'll see that Robbins is unbelievably gentlemanly toward the TMZ reporter, patiently explaining his voting difficulties, before urging him to go off and vote himself. Maybe my conservative blogger pals are extra cranky today, with the polls painting a bleak picture for election night, but if they want to stereotype a Hollywood actor as a dilettante, they'll have to do better than this.

Photo of Tim Robbins by Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times

Maybe it was the retro feel of the ancient elementary school where I went to vote this morning, maybe it was seeing my wife take our 10-year-old into the voting booth and letting him punch the tab next to Barack Obama's name, but I had a massive attack of nostalgia wandering around Broxton Elementary's auditorium, thinking about the first time I voted as a teenager in Chicago. It was the 1970s and the city was still ruled by Richard J. Daley, father of the current longtime mayor, and known to all as Hizzoner, or just Da Mare.

The Chicago of today that helped propel Obama to the brink of the presidency is a very different place -- gentrified, yuppified, full of white-collar professionals, with trendy coffee bars on practically every corner. Back then, Chicago was still a working-class town with a political machine that delivered votes the old fashioned way. As the old maxim held, in Chicago you voted early and often. On election day, the winos would stumble into the polling place, pull the Democratic lever and get a bottle of muscatel. The blacks on the South Side voted Democratic and came home with a chicken. The white lower-income families voted Democratic, safe in the knowledge that Daley would make sure none of those loyal African American voters ever moved into their neighborhood.

In Chicago, politics mattered. As a snot-nosed college kid, I was always voting for some reform candidate, supporting the local alderman who bucked Daley's machine. But Da Mare had a very instructive way of reminding voters of the price of disloyalty. In November, not long after election day, Chicago would invariably have its first big snowstorm. And if you lived in a district represented by a maverick alderman, you could tell exactly where his district began and the machine's district ended, because that's where the snow plows would stop. Da Mare's streets were squeaky clean, your street was 8 inches deep with snow. It was a better lesson than anything I learned in Political Science 101.   

I live today on the Westside of Los Angeles, which is just as loyal a Democratic stronghold as Chicago was then -- and is now. When I go jogging around Santa Monica, I see Obama signs in front of a house on every block, Obama bumper stickers on hundreds of cars. Some things never change. I remember as a kid, driving out to the West Side of Chicago, seeing endless blocks of row houses, each one with a placard in the front window, saying "Re-Elect Mayor Daley." He was elected six times in all, but since I'm going all nostalgic today, I thought I'd let you read an excerpt from "Boss," the late Mike Royko's classic Daley biography that offers a memorable account of Daley's political rule of the Second City.

Perhaps the best chapter details Daley's 1963 reelection campaign, when he was challenged by a local crusader named Ben Adamowski who'd been investigating various scandals in the Daley administration. If Obama wins tonight, he will be propelled to victory, in part, by an enormous turnout in the African American community. Forty-five years ago it was Daley who rode the coattails of the black vote. But as Royko makes clear, we live in a different world today. The black vote in Chicago 45 years ago served a machine politician who epitomized the triumph of the status quo. Today the black vote goes to a candidate who has made change the fundamental cause of his campaign.

UPDATE: Talk about a small Chicago world: When reporters staked out Obama's local polling place--the Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School--waiting for the candidate to arrive, guess who showed up to vote? Bill Ayers!

But as I was saying, oh boy, there was nothing like a political campaign with Daley at the top of the ticket. How did the Daley machine triumph on election day? Keep reading:

Four years ago, in the days leading up to the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry election, I staged a debate between a Hollywood liberal and a Hollywood conservative in one of the back rooms of the Sony commissary. As they say at the U.N., they had a frank exchange of views; the charges and countercharges were flying. And even though I'm a liberal, I have to admit that if I were scoring it like a heavyweight fight, I'd have to say--perhaps as a portent of things to come that year--that the conservative won by a knockout.

The conservative was Michael De Luca, a former production chief at New Line who's now an independent producer, having made such recent films as "Ghost Rider" and "The Love Guru." Born in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, De Luca had been a moderate Democrat until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The muscular Republican response to terrorism won him over, prompting him to pick Bush over Kerry in 2004. He's also been a longtime admirer of John McCain. But no longer.

"I'm inching toward Obama," he told me today. "There isn't anything unique about me. If you look at what Colin Powell has said and Peggy Noonan and Christopher Hitchens, you'll see this is a bigger thing with people who believe in the ideals of the Republican party, but are disgusted by what's happened during the past four years. After the Justice Department scandal, the Katrina [mess] ups, the Plame scandal, all of the catering to the religious right, this is about the narrowing of appeal for the entire Republican party. It feels like a collapse of a conservative movement that goes all the way back to Barry Goldwater. It's a perfect storm that is driving moderates like myself out of the party."

Like producer Eric Gold, the onetime McCain supporter who announced his support for Obama this morning, De Luca isn't starry-eyed about the Democratic challenger. "But after watching the debates, I think Obama has the temperament to sit in the Oval Office, which isn't something you feel as sure about with McCain. I worry that McCain today is more in league with the lunatic fringe of the right than Obama is with the lunatic fringe of the left."

De Luca certainly hasn't been swayed to Obama by any of his Hollywood liberal pals. Au contraire. "All they do is scream about Sarah Palin. I'm sure they'd happily embrace a socialist government. They basically have the Janeane Garofalo point of view, which seems to be that Republicans should be put in jail for being Republicans." He laughs. "I keep telling 'em, 'Shut up! If you want my vote, don't open your mouth. I'm almost there.' "

Having had a number of lively political debates with De Luca over the years, I asked him to write an essay about his anguish over this election. Call it "The Thoughts of a Conflicted Conservative." It's a good read, especially for Hollywood liberals who live in such an insular lefty world that they rarely get to hear a thoughtful conservative point of view. Here's De Luca's take on why he's having trouble sticking with the GOP ticket:

As we head into the final week of the presidential campaign, it's becoming apparent that Sarah Palin may have solidified John McCain's appeal with his GOP base, but the VP pick has wreaked havoc with McCain's support -- such as it is -- in Hollywood. I was just on the phone with manager-producer Eric Gold, who handles Jim Carrey and Ellen DeGeneres, who had been a longtime McCain supporter and contributor, going back to McCain's quixotic 2000 presidential campaign. Thing is, Gold just cast his absentee ballot -- for Barack Obama. What makes Gold's conversion especially revealing is that he is hardly an Obama admirer.

"Obama has done nothing," Gold says. "He has no real experience. I mean, being a community organizer and running for president -- who are we kidding? In the debates, he said nothing -- less than nothing. He's just selling temperament." But after McCain picked Palin as his VP, Gold, who calls himself a "disenfranchised Democrat," began to sour on his longtime political hero. (As have other McCain supporters.)

"If McCain had picked Lindsey Graham or Joe Lieberman, I'd probably be voting differently," says Gold. "But to pick someone of such lightweight proportions as Sarah Palin, that was the nail in the coffin. What he did by picking her was say: I'll do anything to win. He didn't care about the moderates or the independents, which unfortunately meant he didn't care about me. The real John McCain would never have done that. He went against his own principles."

Gold says that for years he stood up for McCain in a hostile environment -- liberal Hollywood. "Obviously this is a town that's not very sympathetic to Republicans," he says. "But his pandering, first with Palin, then with the speeches about Obama being a pal of terrorists, it wasn't worthy of McCain, the guy who was a different kind of Republican. All my liberal friends would say: This is the guy you're standing up for? I was embarrassed. I have lots of doubts about Obama, but everything John McCain has done in the past two months has just driven me back to the Democratic Party."

Gold is not the only McCain fan beginning to break ranks with the Republican candidate over his Palin pick and campaign tactics. Later today I'll be posting an essay from another prominent Hollywood McCain supporter -- who voted for George Bush in 2004 -- who's finding it hard to pull the GOP lever this time around. Stay tuned.

RELATED:

Do Republicans run dirtier campaigns than Democrats?

The 2008 Election: Casting the Hollywood movie

Gasp! Right-wing media bashes 'American Carol'!

Photo of John McCain by Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, the two dark wizards of hardball politics, have already been the subject of documentaries detailing all of their shrewd election strategies and dirty tricks. Now writer-director Billy Ray, who directed the compelling film "Shattered Glass," has a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a film about Allen Raymond, the GOP political operative who actually went to jail after being convicted of conspiracy charges after jamming the phones at Democratic headquarters in the middle of a hotly contested 2002 New Hampshire senatorial race. (The Democratic candidate lost by roughly 20,000 votes.)

Ray has written a script based on Raymond's recently published memoir, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." He's beginning the process of casting the film, working with a contingent of producers who include Generate partner Pete Aronson, who was Raymond's college roommate and encouraged Raymond to write about his experiences. I immediately called up Ray, because if his take on political chicanery is half as fascinating as "Shattered Glass' " portrait of media fabrication, then we might be in for quite a ride.

One thing that fascinated me about Raymond's story is that, like Atwater, he was a mercenary. As  "Boogieman," the new Atwater documentary reveals, Atwater wasn't a die-hard conservative--he turned to Republican causes early on because in the South in the 1960s, the GOP was the party out of power, offering more opportunities for an ambitious young operative; likewise with Raymond, who came from a family of Democrats. "He had no particular political leanings," says Ray. "It was pure ambition. The job and the money was with the Republicans, so that's where he went. He wasn't a holy warrior, just a bright, extremely competitive guy who wanted to climb the corporate ladder."

If you think about it, it's a universal movie character, whether it's Charlie Sheen in "Wall Street" or Ray Liotta in "GoodFellas" or, to use Ray's example, Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer." "He's a guy whose lost his moral rudder," says Ray. "In my script, while the narrative engine is the world of politics, the pulse of the movie is personal. This is a guy who loses his family and the only way to get them back is by regaining his integrity."

It was Atwater who invented the black art of push polling. Raymond took that deception one step further. When he wanted to influence voters in white ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, Raymond would hire an African American voice actor, get him to use his most thuggish ghetto voice and record phone messages, pretending to be a Democratic operative trying to get voters to support a Democratic candidate while, of course, preying on the bias of the person receiving the call. Ray says John McCain is guilty of similar tactics, citing his recent ads portraying Barack Obama's support of a bill educating youngsters on dealing with sexual predators as actually touting sex education for toddlers.

I know what my conservative friends would say: When Hollywood tells a story about campaign dirty tricks, why is it always the Republicans who are always at fault? Sure, the Democrats have gone down to defeat again and again with weak-kneed softies like Bob Shrum running their campaigns, but don't the Democrats play hardball too? Isn't this yet another example of Hollywood bias? Ray didn't flinch. "That's a completely fair criticism," he says. "There have definitely been more movies made about Republican corruption than Democratic corruption. But based on my research and experience, Republicans do it more, do it more effectively and do it without conscience." Why? "Because they believe that their cause is so just that, in a larger sense, any attempt to secure or hold onto power is justified."

Ray insists his script is fair-minded. "I did the reporting. I haven't embellished or manufactured anything. I'm just telling the story and I'll let people judge for themselves." The movie hopes to start production next year, but with a hotly contested election in its final days, I'd be eager to hear your take on the question: Is Hollywood biased against Republicans or do they just step over the line more often than Democrats?   

Photo of Billy Ray by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Tim Robbins: NOT a victim of vast right-wing conspiracy

The Bush administration wasn't actually secretly trying to prevent liberal activist Tim Robbins from voting for president last Tuesday. If you missed it, Robbins got into a noisy argument with a polling worker after no one could find his name on the rolls of registered voters at his local polling place in New York, even though the actor said he'd been voting at the same location for years. But according to a report from Access Hollywood picked up by MSNBC, Robbins, ahem, went to the wrong polling place.

The New York City Board of Elections wrote the actor a letter saying he should have voted at a library on West 20th Street, not the YMCA on West 14th Street where he and Susan Sarandon turned up to vote. It's pretty evident from the sly tone of the letter that the election board was getting its revenge for being portrayed by Robbins in various news reports as a cloddish bureaucratic sinkhole. "It would appear, based on a review of your voter registration history, that your voting experience was less than positive because you simply went to the wrong poll site," an election board member wrote, coolly sticking the knife in by adding that if there was confusion over the appropriate voting location, it might be because "you have not voted in an recent election, including the presidential primary in February 2008 and the party primary in September 2008."

Ouch! Is it really possible that Robbins, who seems to speak out more on American foreign policy than, well, most U.S. senators, didn't actually vote in the pivotal New York presidential primary? OMG! Wait till Dirty Harry, my favorite right-wing, Robbins-loathing blogger, hears about this--it'll make his day!

But wait--Robbins isn't taking this lying down. He disputes the election board's claims, saying it's a PR stunt "to try to cover their butts over their ineptitude." He says he voted as his regular polling place in both 2004 and 2006--and has a copy of his voter registration clearly showing his home address. "Something doesn't [jibe] with the actions of the Board of Elections," he told Access Hollywood. "For no good reason, they chose to take this active voter off the voting rolls." Robbins says he is examining legal options, saying the board's release of his personal information is "an invasion of privacy and further insult."

Stay tuned. Somehow I think this election dispute may last longer than Gore vs. Bush 2000.

RELATED:

Robbins Argues with Polling Workers on Election Day

Photo of Tim Robbins by Los Angeles Times

David Geffen is no dummy. When I called him today, he knew exactly what I wanted to talk about: "Maureen's column, right?" he said before I could finish a sentence. I guess you don't get to be a fabulously successful media mogul without having a sixth sense of what on someone's mind, whether they're a famous filmmaker or a tongue-tied reporter.

When historians start looking for turning points in the trajectory of the Obama campaign for the presidency, they will inevitably turn to Feb. 21, 2007, the day that the New York Times' Maureen Dowd ran a column where Geffen blasted then-Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. He didn't just say he disliked Hillary, he dismissed her as "the easiest [candidate] to beat." He called Hillary overproduced and overscripted. "It's not a very big thing to say, 'I made a mistake' on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't."

Geffen added that after eight years of George W. Bush as president, "I don't think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is--and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton--can bring the country together." Geffen's indictment of Clinton caused a firestorm. It's easy to forget that back in the winter of 2007, Hillary wasn't just the front runner--she was considered inevitable. The entire Clinton campaign was based on a sense of her invincibility. Clinton operatives were telling deep-pocket party supporters--you better sign on now. The train is leaving the station and you don't want it leaving without you.

Geffen broke the spell. Having soured on the Clintons after raising huge sums of money for Bill and sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom--twice--Geffen found himself enamored of Obama from the first time he saw him on TV, giving a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "I thought he was a remarkable guy," Geffen told me today. "After I heard him give that speech, I called him up and said, 'You're going to run for president and I'm going to support you.' " Geffen says Obama laughed and said he was very flattered, but that he wasn't running.

Cut to two years later. "He called me one day and said with a laugh, ' David, I guess you're right. I am running for president and I'd like your support.' And of course, I said, 'You have it.' "

What is the private Obama like? And how did Dowd get Geffen to finally go public with his complaints about Hillary? Keep reading:

This stuff never happens to Arnold Schwarzenegger. When Tim Robbins went to his local polling place today at the 14th Street YMCA in Manhattan, no one could find his name in the rolls of registered voters, even though he'd been voting at the same location for years. According to TMZ, an argument erupted after Robbins was told he'd have to fill out a provisional ballot. "Robbins allegedly got loud and the poll worker said he was calling the cops. Robbins accused the poll worker of trying to intimidate him so he wouldn't vote."

Of course, the right-wing press has been having a field day with this nugget, with the New York Post snarkily describing the actor as "liberal poster boy Tim Robbins" and quoting a poll worker as saying Robbins was "obnoxious." Dirty Harry's blog tagged the story "Snit Alert." It's not exactly news that conservatives loathe Robbins--they're always complaining about how his activism makes it impossible for any patriotic moviegoer to enjoy his films. But if you watch the TMZ video for yourself, you'll see that Robbins is unbelievably gentlemanly toward the TMZ reporter, patiently explaining his voting difficulties, before urging him to go off and vote himself. Maybe my conservative blogger pals are extra cranky today, with the polls painting a bleak picture for election night, but if they want to stereotype a Hollywood actor as a dilettante, they'll have to do better than this.

Photo of Tim Robbins by Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times

Maybe it was the retro feel of the ancient elementary school where I went to vote this morning, maybe it was seeing my wife take our 10-year-old into the voting booth and letting him punch the tab next to Barack Obama's name, but I had a massive attack of nostalgia wandering around Broxton Elementary's auditorium, thinking about the first time I voted as a teenager in Chicago. It was the 1970s and the city was still ruled by Richard J. Daley, father of the current longtime mayor, and known to all as Hizzoner, or just Da Mare.

The Chicago of today that helped propel Obama to the brink of the presidency is a very different place -- gentrified, yuppified, full of white-collar professionals, with trendy coffee bars on practically every corner. Back then, Chicago was still a working-class town with a political machine that delivered votes the old fashioned way. As the old maxim held, in Chicago you voted early and often. On election day, the winos would stumble into the polling place, pull the Democratic lever and get a bottle of muscatel. The blacks on the South Side voted Democratic and came home with a chicken. The white lower-income families voted Democratic, safe in the knowledge that Daley would make sure none of those loyal African American voters ever moved into their neighborhood.

In Chicago, politics mattered. As a snot-nosed college kid, I was always voting for some reform candidate, supporting the local alderman who bucked Daley's machine. But Da Mare had a very instructive way of reminding voters of the price of disloyalty. In November, not long after election day, Chicago would invariably have its first big snowstorm. And if you lived in a district represented by a maverick alderman, you could tell exactly where his district began and the machine's district ended, because that's where the snow plows would stop. Da Mare's streets were squeaky clean, your street was 8 inches deep with snow. It was a better lesson than anything I learned in Political Science 101.   

I live today on the Westside of Los Angeles, which is just as loyal a Democratic stronghold as Chicago was then -- and is now. When I go jogging around Santa Monica, I see Obama signs in front of a house on every block, Obama bumper stickers on hundreds of cars. Some things never change. I remember as a kid, driving out to the West Side of Chicago, seeing endless blocks of row houses, each one with a placard in the front window, saying "Re-Elect Mayor Daley." He was elected six times in all, but since I'm going all nostalgic today, I thought I'd let you read an excerpt from "Boss," the late Mike Royko's classic Daley biography that offers a memorable account of Daley's political rule of the Second City.

Perhaps the best chapter details Daley's 1963 reelection campaign, when he was challenged by a local crusader named Ben Adamowski who'd been investigating various scandals in the Daley administration. If Obama wins tonight, he will be propelled to victory, in part, by an enormous turnout in the African American community. Forty-five years ago it was Daley who rode the coattails of the black vote. But as Royko makes clear, we live in a different world today. The black vote in Chicago 45 years ago served a machine politician who epitomized the triumph of the status quo. Today the black vote goes to a candidate who has made change the fundamental cause of his campaign.

UPDATE: Talk about a small Chicago world: When reporters staked out Obama's local polling place--the Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School--waiting for the candidate to arrive, guess who showed up to vote? Bill Ayers!

But as I was saying, oh boy, there was nothing like a political campaign with Daley at the top of the ticket. How did the Daley machine triumph on election day? Keep reading:

Four years ago, in the days leading up to the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry election, I staged a debate between a Hollywood liberal and a Hollywood conservative in one of the back rooms of the Sony commissary. As they say at the U.N., they had a frank exchange of views; the charges and countercharges were flying. And even though I'm a liberal, I have to admit that if I were scoring it like a heavyweight fight, I'd have to say--perhaps as a portent of things to come that year--that the conservative won by a knockout.

The conservative was Michael De Luca, a former production chief at New Line who's now an independent producer, having made such recent films as "Ghost Rider" and "The Love Guru." Born in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, De Luca had been a moderate Democrat until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The muscular Republican response to terrorism won him over, prompting him to pick Bush over Kerry in 2004. He's also been a longtime admirer of John McCain. But no longer.

"I'm inching toward Obama," he told me today. "There isn't anything unique about me. If you look at what Colin Powell has said and Peggy Noonan and Christopher Hitchens, you'll see this is a bigger thing with people who believe in the ideals of the Republican party, but are disgusted by what's happened during the past four years. After the Justice Department scandal, the Katrina [mess] ups, the Plame scandal, all of the catering to the religious right, this is about the narrowing of appeal for the entire Republican party. It feels like a collapse of a conservative movement that goes all the way back to Barry Goldwater. It's a perfect storm that is driving moderates like myself out of the party."

Like producer Eric Gold, the onetime McCain supporter who announced his support for Obama this morning, De Luca isn't starry-eyed about the Democratic challenger. "But after watching the debates, I think Obama has the temperament to sit in the Oval Office, which isn't something you feel as sure about with McCain. I worry that McCain today is more in league with the lunatic fringe of the right than Obama is with the lunatic fringe of the left."

De Luca certainly hasn't been swayed to Obama by any of his Hollywood liberal pals. Au contraire. "All they do is scream about Sarah Palin. I'm sure they'd happily embrace a socialist government. They basically have the Janeane Garofalo point of view, which seems to be that Republicans should be put in jail for being Republicans." He laughs. "I keep telling 'em, 'Shut up! If you want my vote, don't open your mouth. I'm almost there.' "

Having had a number of lively political debates with De Luca over the years, I asked him to write an essay about his anguish over this election. Call it "The Thoughts of a Conflicted Conservative." It's a good read, especially for Hollywood liberals who live in such an insular lefty world that they rarely get to hear a thoughtful conservative point of view. Here's De Luca's take on why he's having trouble sticking with the GOP ticket:

As we head into the final week of the presidential campaign, it's becoming apparent that Sarah Palin may have solidified John McCain's appeal with his GOP base, but the VP pick has wreaked havoc with McCain's support -- such as it is -- in Hollywood. I was just on the phone with manager-producer Eric Gold, who handles Jim Carrey and Ellen DeGeneres, who had been a longtime McCain supporter and contributor, going back to McCain's quixotic 2000 presidential campaign. Thing is, Gold just cast his absentee ballot -- for Barack Obama. What makes Gold's conversion especially revealing is that he is hardly an Obama admirer.

"Obama has done nothing," Gold says. "He has no real experience. I mean, being a community organizer and running for president -- who are we kidding? In the debates, he said nothing -- less than nothing. He's just selling temperament." But after McCain picked Palin as his VP, Gold, who calls himself a "disenfranchised Democrat," began to sour on his longtime political hero. (As have other McCain supporters.)

"If McCain had picked Lindsey Graham or Joe Lieberman, I'd probably be voting differently," says Gold. "But to pick someone of such lightweight proportions as Sarah Palin, that was the nail in the coffin. What he did by picking her was say: I'll do anything to win. He didn't care about the moderates or the independents, which unfortunately meant he didn't care about me. The real John McCain would never have done that. He went against his own principles."

Gold says that for years he stood up for McCain in a hostile environment -- liberal Hollywood. "Obviously this is a town that's not very sympathetic to Republicans," he says. "But his pandering, first with Palin, then with the speeches about Obama being a pal of terrorists, it wasn't worthy of McCain, the guy who was a different kind of Republican. All my liberal friends would say: This is the guy you're standing up for? I was embarrassed. I have lots of doubts about Obama, but everything John McCain has done in the past two months has just driven me back to the Democratic Party."

Gold is not the only McCain fan beginning to break ranks with the Republican candidate over his Palin pick and campaign tactics. Later today I'll be posting an essay from another prominent Hollywood McCain supporter -- who voted for George Bush in 2004 -- who's finding it hard to pull the GOP lever this time around. Stay tuned.

RELATED:

Do Republicans run dirtier campaigns than Democrats?

The 2008 Election: Casting the Hollywood movie

Gasp! Right-wing media bashes 'American Carol'!

Photo of John McCain by Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, the two dark wizards of hardball politics, have already been the subject of documentaries detailing all of their shrewd election strategies and dirty tricks. Now writer-director Billy Ray, who directed the compelling film "Shattered Glass," has a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a film about Allen Raymond, the GOP political operative who actually went to jail after being convicted of conspiracy charges after jamming the phones at Democratic headquarters in the middle of a hotly contested 2002 New Hampshire senatorial race. (The Democratic candidate lost by roughly 20,000 votes.)

Ray has written a script based on Raymond's recently published memoir, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." He's beginning the process of casting the film, working with a contingent of producers who include Generate partner Pete Aronson, who was Raymond's college roommate and encouraged Raymond to write about his experiences. I immediately called up Ray, because if his take on political chicanery is half as fascinating as "Shattered Glass' " portrait of media fabrication, then we might be in for quite a ride.

One thing that fascinated me about Raymond's story is that, like Atwater, he was a mercenary. As  "Boogieman," the new Atwater documentary reveals, Atwater wasn't a die-hard conservative--he turned to Republican causes early on because in the South in the 1960s, the GOP was the party out of power, offering more opportunities for an ambitious young operative; likewise with Raymond, who came from a family of Democrats. "He had no particular political leanings," says Ray. "It was pure ambition. The job and the money was with the Republicans, so that's where he went. He wasn't a holy warrior, just a bright, extremely competitive guy who wanted to climb the corporate ladder."

If you think about it, it's a universal movie character, whether it's Charlie Sheen in "Wall Street" or Ray Liotta in "GoodFellas" or, to use Ray's example, Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer." "He's a guy whose lost his moral rudder," says Ray. "In my script, while the narrative engine is the world of politics, the pulse of the movie is personal. This is a guy who loses his family and the only way to get them back is by regaining his integrity."

It was Atwater who invented the black art of push polling. Raymond took that deception one step further. When he wanted to influence voters in white ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, Raymond would hire an African American voice actor, get him to use his most thuggish ghetto voice and record phone messages, pretending to be a Democratic operative trying to get voters to support a Democratic candidate while, of course, preying on the bias of the person receiving the call. Ray says John McCain is guilty of similar tactics, citing his recent ads portraying Barack Obama's support of a bill educating youngsters on dealing with sexual predators as actually touting sex education for toddlers.

I know what my conservative friends would say: When Hollywood tells a story about campaign dirty tricks, why is it always the Republicans who are always at fault? Sure, the Democrats have gone down to defeat again and again with weak-kneed softies like Bob Shrum running their campaigns, but don't the Democrats play hardball too? Isn't this yet another example of Hollywood bias? Ray didn't flinch. "That's a completely fair criticism," he says. "There have definitely been more movies made about Republican corruption than Democratic corruption. But based on my research and experience, Republicans do it more, do it more effectively and do it without conscience." Why? "Because they believe that their cause is so just that, in a larger sense, any attempt to secure or hold onto power is justified."

Ray insists his script is fair-minded. "I did the reporting. I haven't embellished or manufactured anything. I'm just telling the story and I'll let people judge for themselves." The movie hopes to start production next year, but with a hotly contested election in its final days, I'd be eager to hear your take on the question: Is Hollywood biased against Republicans or do they just step over the line more often than Democrats?   

Photo of Billy Ray by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Geffen on Obama: 'He'll be an inspiring president'

David Geffen is no dummy. When I called him today, he knew exactly what I wanted to talk about: "Maureen's column, right?" he said before I could finish a sentence. I guess you don't get to be a fabulously successful media mogul without having a sixth sense of what on someone's mind, whether they're a famous filmmaker or a tongue-tied reporter.

When historians start looking for turning points in the trajectory of the Obama campaign for the presidency, they will inevitably turn to Feb. 21, 2007, the day that the New York Times' Maureen Dowd ran a column where Geffen blasted then-Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. He didn't just say he disliked Hillary, he dismissed her as "the easiest [candidate] to beat." He called Hillary overproduced and overscripted. "It's not a very big thing to say, 'I made a mistake' on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't."

Geffen added that after eight years of George W. Bush as president, "I don't think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is--and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton--can bring the country together." Geffen's indictment of Clinton caused a firestorm. It's easy to forget that back in the winter of 2007, Hillary wasn't just the front runner--she was considered inevitable. The entire Clinton campaign was based on a sense of her invincibility. Clinton operatives were telling deep-pocket party supporters--you better sign on now. The train is leaving the station and you don't want it leaving without you.

Geffen broke the spell. Having soured on the Clintons after raising huge sums of money for Bill and sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom--twice--Geffen found himself enamored of Obama from the first time he saw him on TV, giving a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "I thought he was a remarkable guy," Geffen told me today. "After I heard him give that speech, I called him up and said, 'You're going to run for president and I'm going to support you.' " Geffen says Obama laughed and said he was very flattered, but that he wasn't running.

Cut to two years later. "He called me one day and said with a laugh, ' David, I guess you're right. I am running for president and I'd like your support.' And of course, I said, 'You have it.' "

What is the private Obama like? And how did Dowd get Geffen to finally go public with his complaints about Hillary? Keep reading:

This stuff never happens to Arnold Schwarzenegger. When Tim Robbins went to his local polling place today at the 14th Street YMCA in Manhattan, no one could find his name in the rolls of registered voters, even though he'd been voting at the same location for years. According to TMZ, an argument erupted after Robbins was told he'd have to fill out a provisional ballot. "Robbins allegedly got loud and the poll worker said he was calling the cops. Robbins accused the poll worker of trying to intimidate him so he wouldn't vote."

Of course, the right-wing press has been having a field day with this nugget, with the New York Post snarkily describing the actor as "liberal poster boy Tim Robbins" and quoting a poll worker as saying Robbins was "obnoxious." Dirty Harry's blog tagged the story "Snit Alert." It's not exactly news that conservatives loathe Robbins--they're always complaining about how his activism makes it impossible for any patriotic moviegoer to enjoy his films. But if you watch the TMZ video for yourself, you'll see that Robbins is unbelievably gentlemanly toward the TMZ reporter, patiently explaining his voting difficulties, before urging him to go off and vote himself. Maybe my conservative blogger pals are extra cranky today, with the polls painting a bleak picture for election night, but if they want to stereotype a Hollywood actor as a dilettante, they'll have to do better than this.

Photo of Tim Robbins by Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times

Maybe it was the retro feel of the ancient elementary school where I went to vote this morning, maybe it was seeing my wife take our 10-year-old into the voting booth and letting him punch the tab next to Barack Obama's name, but I had a massive attack of nostalgia wandering around Broxton Elementary's auditorium, thinking about the first time I voted as a teenager in Chicago. It was the 1970s and the city was still ruled by Richard J. Daley, father of the current longtime mayor, and known to all as Hizzoner, or just Da Mare.

The Chicago of today that helped propel Obama to the brink of the presidency is a very different place -- gentrified, yuppified, full of white-collar professionals, with trendy coffee bars on practically every corner. Back then, Chicago was still a working-class town with a political machine that delivered votes the old fashioned way. As the old maxim held, in Chicago you voted early and often. On election day, the winos would stumble into the polling place, pull the Democratic lever and get a bottle of muscatel. The blacks on the South Side voted Democratic and came home with a chicken. The white lower-income families voted Democratic, safe in the knowledge that Daley would make sure none of those loyal African American voters ever moved into their neighborhood.

In Chicago, politics mattered. As a snot-nosed college kid, I was always voting for some reform candidate, supporting the local alderman who bucked Daley's machine. But Da Mare had a very instructive way of reminding voters of the price of disloyalty. In November, not long after election day, Chicago would invariably have its first big snowstorm. And if you lived in a district represented by a maverick alderman, you could tell exactly where his district began and the machine's district ended, because that's where the snow plows would stop. Da Mare's streets were squeaky clean, your street was 8 inches deep with snow. It was a better lesson than anything I learned in Political Science 101.   

I live today on the Westside of Los Angeles, which is just as loyal a Democratic stronghold as Chicago was then -- and is now. When I go jogging around Santa Monica, I see Obama signs in front of a house on every block, Obama bumper stickers on hundreds of cars. Some things never change. I remember as a kid, driving out to the West Side of Chicago, seeing endless blocks of row houses, each one with a placard in the front window, saying "Re-Elect Mayor Daley." He was elected six times in all, but since I'm going all nostalgic today, I thought I'd let you read an excerpt from "Boss," the late Mike Royko's classic Daley biography that offers a memorable account of Daley's political rule of the Second City.

Perhaps the best chapter details Daley's 1963 reelection campaign, when he was challenged by a local crusader named Ben Adamowski who'd been investigating various scandals in the Daley administration. If Obama wins tonight, he will be propelled to victory, in part, by an enormous turnout in the African American community. Forty-five years ago it was Daley who rode the coattails of the black vote. But as Royko makes clear, we live in a different world today. The black vote in Chicago 45 years ago served a machine politician who epitomized the triumph of the status quo. Today the black vote goes to a candidate who has made change the fundamental cause of his campaign.

UPDATE: Talk about a small Chicago world: When reporters staked out Obama's local polling place--the Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School--waiting for the candidate to arrive, guess who showed up to vote? Bill Ayers!

But as I was saying, oh boy, there was nothing like a political campaign with Daley at the top of the ticket. How did the Daley machine triumph on election day? Keep reading:

Four years ago, in the days leading up to the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry election, I staged a debate between a Hollywood liberal and a Hollywood conservative in one of the back rooms of the Sony commissary. As they say at the U.N., they had a frank exchange of views; the charges and countercharges were flying. And even though I'm a liberal, I have to admit that if I were scoring it like a heavyweight fight, I'd have to say--perhaps as a portent of things to come that year--that the conservative won by a knockout.

The conservative was Michael De Luca, a former production chief at New Line who's now an independent producer, having made such recent films as "Ghost Rider" and "The Love Guru." Born in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, De Luca had been a moderate Democrat until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The muscular Republican response to terrorism won him over, prompting him to pick Bush over Kerry in 2004. He's also been a longtime admirer of John McCain. But no longer.

"I'm inching toward Obama," he told me today. "There isn't anything unique about me. If you look at what Colin Powell has said and Peggy Noonan and Christopher Hitchens, you'll see this is a bigger thing with people who believe in the ideals of the Republican party, but are disgusted by what's happened during the past four years. After the Justice Department scandal, the Katrina [mess] ups, the Plame scandal, all of the catering to the religious right, this is about the narrowing of appeal for the entire Republican party. It feels like a collapse of a conservative movement that goes all the way back to Barry Goldwater. It's a perfect storm that is driving moderates like myself out of the party."

Like producer Eric Gold, the onetime McCain supporter who announced his support for Obama this morning, De Luca isn't starry-eyed about the Democratic challenger. "But after watching the debates, I think Obama has the temperament to sit in the Oval Office, which isn't something you feel as sure about with McCain. I worry that McCain today is more in league with the lunatic fringe of the right than Obama is with the lunatic fringe of the left."

De Luca certainly hasn't been swayed to Obama by any of his Hollywood liberal pals. Au contraire. "All they do is scream about Sarah Palin. I'm sure they'd happily embrace a socialist government. They basically have the Janeane Garofalo point of view, which seems to be that Republicans should be put in jail for being Republicans." He laughs. "I keep telling 'em, 'Shut up! If you want my vote, don't open your mouth. I'm almost there.' "

Having had a number of lively political debates with De Luca over the years, I asked him to write an essay about his anguish over this election. Call it "The Thoughts of a Conflicted Conservative." It's a good read, especially for Hollywood liberals who live in such an insular lefty world that they rarely get to hear a thoughtful conservative point of view. Here's De Luca's take on why he's having trouble sticking with the GOP ticket:

As we head into the final week of the presidential campaign, it's becoming apparent that Sarah Palin may have solidified John McCain's appeal with his GOP base, but the VP pick has wreaked havoc with McCain's support -- such as it is -- in Hollywood. I was just on the phone with manager-producer Eric Gold, who handles Jim Carrey and Ellen DeGeneres, who had been a longtime McCain supporter and contributor, going back to McCain's quixotic 2000 presidential campaign. Thing is, Gold just cast his absentee ballot -- for Barack Obama. What makes Gold's conversion especially revealing is that he is hardly an Obama admirer.

"Obama has done nothing," Gold says. "He has no real experience. I mean, being a community organizer and running for president -- who are we kidding? In the debates, he said nothing -- less than nothing. He's just selling temperament." But after McCain picked Palin as his VP, Gold, who calls himself a "disenfranchised Democrat," began to sour on his longtime political hero. (As have other McCain supporters.)

"If McCain had picked Lindsey Graham or Joe Lieberman, I'd probably be voting differently," says Gold. "But to pick someone of such lightweight proportions as Sarah Palin, that was the nail in the coffin. What he did by picking her was say: I'll do anything to win. He didn't care about the moderates or the independents, which unfortunately meant he didn't care about me. The real John McCain would never have done that. He went against his own principles."

Gold says that for years he stood up for McCain in a hostile environment -- liberal Hollywood. "Obviously this is a town that's not very sympathetic to Republicans," he says. "But his pandering, first with Palin, then with the speeches about Obama being a pal of terrorists, it wasn't worthy of McCain, the guy who was a different kind of Republican. All my liberal friends would say: This is the guy you're standing up for? I was embarrassed. I have lots of doubts about Obama, but everything John McCain has done in the past two months has just driven me back to the Democratic Party."

Gold is not the only McCain fan beginning to break ranks with the Republican candidate over his Palin pick and campaign tactics. Later today I'll be posting an essay from another prominent Hollywood McCain supporter -- who voted for George Bush in 2004 -- who's finding it hard to pull the GOP lever this time around. Stay tuned.

RELATED:

Do Republicans run dirtier campaigns than Democrats?

The 2008 Election: Casting the Hollywood movie

Gasp! Right-wing media bashes 'American Carol'!

Photo of John McCain by Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, the two dark wizards of hardball politics, have already been the subject of documentaries detailing all of their shrewd election strategies and dirty tricks. Now writer-director Billy Ray, who directed the compelling film "Shattered Glass," has a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a film about Allen Raymond, the GOP political operative who actually went to jail after being convicted of conspiracy charges after jamming the phones at Democratic headquarters in the middle of a hotly contested 2002 New Hampshire senatorial race. (The Democratic candidate lost by roughly 20,000 votes.)

Ray has written a script based on Raymond's recently published memoir, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." He's beginning the process of casting the film, working with a contingent of producers who include Generate partner Pete Aronson, who was Raymond's college roommate and encouraged Raymond to write about his experiences. I immediately called up Ray, because if his take on political chicanery is half as fascinating as "Shattered Glass' " portrait of media fabrication, then we might be in for quite a ride.

One thing that fascinated me about Raymond's story is that, like Atwater, he was a mercenary. As  "Boogieman," the new Atwater documentary reveals, Atwater wasn't a die-hard conservative--he turned to Republican causes early on because in the South in the 1960s, the GOP was the party out of power, offering more opportunities for an ambitious young operative; likewise with Raymond, who came from a family of Democrats. "He had no particular political leanings," says Ray. "It was pure ambition. The job and the money was with the Republicans, so that's where he went. He wasn't a holy warrior, just a bright, extremely competitive guy who wanted to climb the corporate ladder."

If you think about it, it's a universal movie character, whether it's Charlie Sheen in "Wall Street" or Ray Liotta in "GoodFellas" or, to use Ray's example, Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer." "He's a guy whose lost his moral rudder," says Ray. "In my script, while the narrative engine is the world of politics, the pulse of the movie is personal. This is a guy who loses his family and the only way to get them back is by regaining his integrity."

It was Atwater who invented the black art of push polling. Raymond took that deception one step further. When he wanted to influence voters in white ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, Raymond would hire an African American voice actor, get him to use his most thuggish ghetto voice and record phone messages, pretending to be a Democratic operative trying to get voters to support a Democratic candidate while, of course, preying on the bias of the person receiving the call. Ray says John McCain is guilty of similar tactics, citing his recent ads portraying Barack Obama's support of a bill educating youngsters on dealing with sexual predators as actually touting sex education for toddlers.

I know what my conservative friends would say: When Hollywood tells a story about campaign dirty tricks, why is it always the Republicans who are always at fault? Sure, the Democrats have gone down to defeat again and again with weak-kneed softies like Bob Shrum running their campaigns, but don't the Democrats play hardball too? Isn't this yet another example of Hollywood bias? Ray didn't flinch. "That's a completely fair criticism," he says. "There have definitely been more movies made about Republican corruption than Democratic corruption. But based on my research and experience, Republicans do it more, do it more effectively and do it without conscience." Why? "Because they believe that their cause is so just that, in a larger sense, any attempt to secure or hold onto power is justified."

Ray insists his script is fair-minded. "I did the reporting. I haven't embellished or manufactured anything. I'm just telling the story and I'll let people judge for themselves." The movie hopes to start production next year, but with a hotly contested election in its final days, I'd be eager to hear your take on the question: Is Hollywood biased against Republicans or do they just step over the line more often than Democrats?   

Photo of Billy Ray by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Vast right-wing conspiracy to rob Tim Robbins of his vote?

This stuff never happens to Arnold Schwarzenegger. When Tim Robbins went to his local polling place today at the 14th Street YMCA in Manhattan, no one could find his name in the rolls of registered voters, even though he'd been voting at the same location for years. According to TMZ, an argument erupted after Robbins was told he'd have to fill out a provisional ballot. "Robbins allegedly got loud and the poll worker said he was calling the cops. Robbins accused the poll worker of trying to intimidate him so he wouldn't vote."

Of course, the right-wing press has been having a field day with this nugget, with the New York Post snarkily describing the actor as "liberal poster boy Tim Robbins" and quoting a poll worker as saying Robbins was "obnoxious." Dirty Harry's blog tagged the story "Snit Alert." It's not exactly news that conservatives loathe Robbins--they're always complaining about how his activism makes it impossible for any patriotic moviegoer to enjoy his films. But if you watch the TMZ video for yourself, you'll see that Robbins is unbelievably gentlemanly toward the TMZ reporter, patiently explaining his voting difficulties, before urging him to go off and vote himself. Maybe my conservative blogger pals are extra cranky today, with the polls painting a bleak picture for election night, but if they want to stereotype a Hollywood actor as a dilettante, they'll have to do better than this.

Photo of Tim Robbins by Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times

Maybe it was the retro feel of the ancient elementary school where I went to vote this morning, maybe it was seeing my wife take our 10-year-old into the voting booth and letting him punch the tab next to Barack Obama's name, but I had a massive attack of nostalgia wandering around Broxton Elementary's auditorium, thinking about the first time I voted as a teenager in Chicago. It was the 1970s and the city was still ruled by Richard J. Daley, father of the current longtime mayor, and known to all as Hizzoner, or just Da Mare.

The Chicago of today that helped propel Obama to the brink of the presidency is a very different place -- gentrified, yuppified, full of white-collar professionals, with trendy coffee bars on practically every corner. Back then, Chicago was still a working-class town with a political machine that delivered votes the old fashioned way. As the old maxim held, in Chicago you voted early and often. On election day, the winos would stumble into the polling place, pull the Democratic lever and get a bottle of muscatel. The blacks on the South Side voted Democratic and came home with a chicken. The white lower-income families voted Democratic, safe in the knowledge that Daley would make sure none of those loyal African American voters ever moved into their neighborhood.

In Chicago, politics mattered. As a snot-nosed college kid, I was always voting for some reform candidate, supporting the local alderman who bucked Daley's machine. But Da Mare had a very instructive way of reminding voters of the price of disloyalty. In November, not long after election day, Chicago would invariably have its first big snowstorm. And if you lived in a district represented by a maverick alderman, you could tell exactly where his district began and the machine's district ended, because that's where the snow plows would stop. Da Mare's streets were squeaky clean, your street was 8 inches deep with snow. It was a better lesson than anything I learned in Political Science 101.   

I live today on the Westside of Los Angeles, which is just as loyal a Democratic stronghold as Chicago was then -- and is now. When I go jogging around Santa Monica, I see Obama signs in front of a house on every block, Obama bumper stickers on hundreds of cars. Some things never change. I remember as a kid, driving out to the West Side of Chicago, seeing endless blocks of row houses, each one with a placard in the front window, saying "Re-Elect Mayor Daley." He was elected six times in all, but since I'm going all nostalgic today, I thought I'd let you read an excerpt from "Boss," the late Mike Royko's classic Daley biography that offers a memorable account of Daley's political rule of the Second City.

Perhaps the best chapter details Daley's 1963 reelection campaign, when he was challenged by a local crusader named Ben Adamowski who'd been investigating various scandals in the Daley administration. If Obama wins tonight, he will be propelled to victory, in part, by an enormous turnout in the African American community. Forty-five years ago it was Daley who rode the coattails of the black vote. But as Royko makes clear, we live in a different world today. The black vote in Chicago 45 years ago served a machine politician who epitomized the triumph of the status quo. Today the black vote goes to a candidate who has made change the fundamental cause of his campaign.

UPDATE: Talk about a small Chicago world: When reporters staked out Obama's local polling place--the Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School--waiting for the candidate to arrive, guess who showed up to vote? Bill Ayers!

But as I was saying, oh boy, there was nothing like a political campaign with Daley at the top of the ticket. How did the Daley machine triumph on election day? Keep reading:

Four years ago, in the days leading up to the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry election, I staged a debate between a Hollywood liberal and a Hollywood conservative in one of the back rooms of the Sony commissary. As they say at the U.N., they had a frank exchange of views; the charges and countercharges were flying. And even though I'm a liberal, I have to admit that if I were scoring it like a heavyweight fight, I'd have to say--perhaps as a portent of things to come that year--that the conservative won by a knockout.

The conservative was Michael De Luca, a former production chief at New Line who's now an independent producer, having made such recent films as "Ghost Rider" and "The Love Guru." Born in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, De Luca had been a moderate Democrat until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The muscular Republican response to terrorism won him over, prompting him to pick Bush over Kerry in 2004. He's also been a longtime admirer of John McCain. But no longer.

"I'm inching toward Obama," he told me today. "There isn't anything unique about me. If you look at what Colin Powell has said and Peggy Noonan and Christopher Hitchens, you'll see this is a bigger thing with people who believe in the ideals of the Republican party, but are disgusted by what's happened during the past four years. After the Justice Department scandal, the Katrina [mess] ups, the Plame scandal, all of the catering to the religious right, this is about the narrowing of appeal for the entire Republican party. It feels like a collapse of a conservative movement that goes all the way back to Barry Goldwater. It's a perfect storm that is driving moderates like myself out of the party."

Like producer Eric Gold, the onetime McCain supporter who announced his support for Obama this morning, De Luca isn't starry-eyed about the Democratic challenger. "But after watching the debates, I think Obama has the temperament to sit in the Oval Office, which isn't something you feel as sure about with McCain. I worry that McCain today is more in league with the lunatic fringe of the right than Obama is with the lunatic fringe of the left."

De Luca certainly hasn't been swayed to Obama by any of his Hollywood liberal pals. Au contraire. "All they do is scream about Sarah Palin. I'm sure they'd happily embrace a socialist government. They basically have the Janeane Garofalo point of view, which seems to be that Republicans should be put in jail for being Republicans." He laughs. "I keep telling 'em, 'Shut up! If you want my vote, don't open your mouth. I'm almost there.' "

Having had a number of lively political debates with De Luca over the years, I asked him to write an essay about his anguish over this election. Call it "The Thoughts of a Conflicted Conservative." It's a good read, especially for Hollywood liberals who live in such an insular lefty world that they rarely get to hear a thoughtful conservative point of view. Here's De Luca's take on why he's having trouble sticking with the GOP ticket:

As we head into the final week of the presidential campaign, it's becoming apparent that Sarah Palin may have solidified John McCain's appeal with his GOP base, but the VP pick has wreaked havoc with McCain's support -- such as it is -- in Hollywood. I was just on the phone with manager-producer Eric Gold, who handles Jim Carrey and Ellen DeGeneres, who had been a longtime McCain supporter and contributor, going back to McCain's quixotic 2000 presidential campaign. Thing is, Gold just cast his absentee ballot -- for Barack Obama. What makes Gold's conversion especially revealing is that he is hardly an Obama admirer.

"Obama has done nothing," Gold says. "He has no real experience. I mean, being a community organizer and running for president -- who are we kidding? In the debates, he said nothing -- less than nothing. He's just selling temperament." But after McCain picked Palin as his VP, Gold, who calls himself a "disenfranchised Democrat," began to sour on his longtime political hero. (As have other McCain supporters.)

"If McCain had picked Lindsey Graham or Joe Lieberman, I'd probably be voting differently," says Gold. "But to pick someone of such lightweight proportions as Sarah Palin, that was the nail in the coffin. What he did by picking her was say: I'll do anything to win. He didn't care about the moderates or the independents, which unfortunately meant he didn't care about me. The real John McCain would never have done that. He went against his own principles."

Gold says that for years he stood up for McCain in a hostile environment -- liberal Hollywood. "Obviously this is a town that's not very sympathetic to Republicans," he says. "But his pandering, first with Palin, then with the speeches about Obama being a pal of terrorists, it wasn't worthy of McCain, the guy who was a different kind of Republican. All my liberal friends would say: This is the guy you're standing up for? I was embarrassed. I have lots of doubts about Obama, but everything John McCain has done in the past two months has just driven me back to the Democratic Party."

Gold is not the only McCain fan beginning to break ranks with the Republican candidate over his Palin pick and campaign tactics. Later today I'll be posting an essay from another prominent Hollywood McCain supporter -- who voted for George Bush in 2004 -- who's finding it hard to pull the GOP lever this time around. Stay tuned.

RELATED:

Do Republicans run dirtier campaigns than Democrats?

The 2008 Election: Casting the Hollywood movie

Gasp! Right-wing media bashes 'American Carol'!

Photo of John McCain by Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, the two dark wizards of hardball politics, have already been the subject of documentaries detailing all of their shrewd election strategies and dirty tricks. Now writer-director Billy Ray, who directed the compelling film "Shattered Glass," has a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a film about Allen Raymond, the GOP political operative who actually went to jail after being convicted of conspiracy charges after jamming the phones at Democratic headquarters in the middle of a hotly contested 2002 New Hampshire senatorial race. (The Democratic candidate lost by roughly 20,000 votes.)

Ray has written a script based on Raymond's recently published memoir, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." He's beginning the process of casting the film, working with a contingent of producers who include Generate partner Pete Aronson, who was Raymond's college roommate and encouraged Raymond to write about his experiences. I immediately called up Ray, because if his take on political chicanery is half as fascinating as "Shattered Glass' " portrait of media fabrication, then we might be in for quite a ride.

One thing that fascinated me about Raymond's story is that, like Atwater, he was a mercenary. As  "Boogieman," the new Atwater documentary reveals, Atwater wasn't a die-hard conservative--he turned to Republican causes early on because in the South in the 1960s, the GOP was the party out of power, offering more opportunities for an ambitious young operative; likewise with Raymond, who came from a family of Democrats. "He had no particular political leanings," says Ray. "It was pure ambition. The job and the money was with the Republicans, so that's where he went. He wasn't a holy warrior, just a bright, extremely competitive guy who wanted to climb the corporate ladder."

If you think about it, it's a universal movie character, whether it's Charlie Sheen in "Wall Street" or Ray Liotta in "GoodFellas" or, to use Ray's example, Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer." "He's a guy whose lost his moral rudder," says Ray. "In my script, while the narrative engine is the world of politics, the pulse of the movie is personal. This is a guy who loses his family and the only way to get them back is by regaining his integrity."

It was Atwater who invented the black art of push polling. Raymond took that deception one step further. When he wanted to influence voters in white ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, Raymond would hire an African American voice actor, get him to use his most thuggish ghetto voice and record phone messages, pretending to be a Democratic operative trying to get voters to support a Democratic candidate while, of course, preying on the bias of the person receiving the call. Ray says John McCain is guilty of similar tactics, citing his recent ads portraying Barack Obama's support of a bill educating youngsters on dealing with sexual predators as actually touting sex education for toddlers.

I know what my conservative friends would say: When Hollywood tells a story about campaign dirty tricks, why is it always the Republicans who are always at fault? Sure, the Democrats have gone down to defeat again and again with weak-kneed softies like Bob Shrum running their campaigns, but don't the Democrats play hardball too? Isn't this yet another example of Hollywood bias? Ray didn't flinch. "That's a completely fair criticism," he says. "There have definitely been more movies made about Republican corruption than Democratic corruption. But based on my research and experience, Republicans do it more, do it more effectively and do it without conscience." Why? "Because they believe that their cause is so just that, in a larger sense, any attempt to secure or hold onto power is justified."

Ray insists his script is fair-minded. "I did the reporting. I haven't embellished or manufactured anything. I'm just telling the story and I'll let people judge for themselves." The movie hopes to start production next year, but with a hotly contested election in its final days, I'd be eager to hear your take on the question: Is Hollywood biased against Republicans or do they just step over the line more often than Democrats?   

Photo of Billy Ray by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Election day: Back to the future

Maybe it was the retro feel of the ancient elementary school where I went to vote this morning, maybe it was seeing my wife take our 10-year-old into the voting booth and letting him punch the tab next to Barack Obama's name, but I had a massive attack of nostalgia wandering around Broxton Elementary's auditorium, thinking about the first time I voted as a teenager in Chicago. It was the 1970s and the city was still ruled by Richard J. Daley, father of the current longtime mayor, and known to all as Hizzoner, or just Da Mare.

The Chicago of today that helped propel Obama to the brink of the presidency is a very different place -- gentrified, yuppified, full of white-collar professionals, with trendy coffee bars on practically every corner. Back then, Chicago was still a working-class town with a political machine that delivered votes the old fashioned way. As the old maxim held, in Chicago you voted early and often. On election day, the winos would stumble into the polling place, pull the Democratic lever and get a bottle of muscatel. The blacks on the South Side voted Democratic and came home with a chicken. The white lower-income families voted Democratic, safe in the knowledge that Daley would make sure none of those loyal African American voters ever moved into their neighborhood.

In Chicago, politics mattered. As a snot-nosed college kid, I was always voting for some reform candidate, supporting the local alderman who bucked Daley's machine. But Da Mare had a very instructive way of reminding voters of the price of disloyalty. In November, not long after election day, Chicago would invariably have its first big snowstorm. And if you lived in a district represented by a maverick alderman, you could tell exactly where his district began and the machine's district ended, because that's where the snow plows would stop. Da Mare's streets were squeaky clean, your street was 8 inches deep with snow. It was a better lesson than anything I learned in Political Science 101.   

I live today on the Westside of Los Angeles, which is just as loyal a Democratic stronghold as Chicago was then -- and is now. When I go jogging around Santa Monica, I see Obama signs in front of a house on every block, Obama bumper stickers on hundreds of cars. Some things never change. I remember as a kid, driving out to the West Side of Chicago, seeing endless blocks of row houses, each one with a placard in the front window, saying "Re-Elect Mayor Daley." He was elected six times in all, but since I'm going all nostalgic today, I thought I'd let you read an excerpt from "Boss," the late Mike Royko's classic Daley biography that offers a memorable account of Daley's political rule of the Second City.

Perhaps the best chapter details Daley's 1963 reelection campaign, when he was challenged by a local crusader named Ben Adamowski who'd been investigating various scandals in the Daley administration. If Obama wins tonight, he will be propelled to victory, in part, by an enormous turnout in the African American community. Forty-five years ago it was Daley who rode the coattails of the black vote. But as Royko makes clear, we live in a different world today. The black vote in Chicago 45 years ago served a machine politician who epitomized the triumph of the status quo. Today the black vote goes to a candidate who has made change the fundamental cause of his campaign.

UPDATE: Talk about a small Chicago world: When reporters staked out Obama's local polling place--the Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School--waiting for the candidate to arrive, guess who showed up to vote? Bill Ayers!

But as I was saying, oh boy, there was nothing like a political campaign with Daley at the top of the ticket. How did the Daley machine triumph on election day? Keep reading:

Four years ago, in the days leading up to the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry election, I staged a debate between a Hollywood liberal and a Hollywood conservative in one of the back rooms of the Sony commissary. As they say at the U.N., they had a frank exchange of views; the charges and countercharges were flying. And even though I'm a liberal, I have to admit that if I were scoring it like a heavyweight fight, I'd have to say--perhaps as a portent of things to come that year--that the conservative won by a knockout.

The conservative was Michael De Luca, a former production chief at New Line who's now an independent producer, having made such recent films as "Ghost Rider" and "The Love Guru." Born in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, De Luca had been a moderate Democrat until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The muscular Republican response to terrorism won him over, prompting him to pick Bush over Kerry in 2004. He's also been a longtime admirer of John McCain. But no longer.

"I'm inching toward Obama," he told me today. "There isn't anything unique about me. If you look at what Colin Powell has said and Peggy Noonan and Christopher Hitchens, you'll see this is a bigger thing with people who believe in the ideals of the Republican party, but are disgusted by what's happened during the past four years. After the Justice Department scandal, the Katrina [mess] ups, the Plame scandal, all of the catering to the religious right, this is about the narrowing of appeal for the entire Republican party. It feels like a collapse of a conservative movement that goes all the way back to Barry Goldwater. It's a perfect storm that is driving moderates like myself out of the party."

Like producer Eric Gold, the onetime McCain supporter who announced his support for Obama this morning, De Luca isn't starry-eyed about the Democratic challenger. "But after watching the debates, I think Obama has the temperament to sit in the Oval Office, which isn't something you feel as sure about with McCain. I worry that McCain today is more in league with the lunatic fringe of the right than Obama is with the lunatic fringe of the left."

De Luca certainly hasn't been swayed to Obama by any of his Hollywood liberal pals. Au contraire. "All they do is scream about Sarah Palin. I'm sure they'd happily embrace a socialist government. They basically have the Janeane Garofalo point of view, which seems to be that Republicans should be put in jail for being Republicans." He laughs. "I keep telling 'em, 'Shut up! If you want my vote, don't open your mouth. I'm almost there.' "

Having had a number of lively political debates with De Luca over the years, I asked him to write an essay about his anguish over this election. Call it "The Thoughts of a Conflicted Conservative." It's a good read, especially for Hollywood liberals who live in such an insular lefty world that they rarely get to hear a thoughtful conservative point of view. Here's De Luca's take on why he's having trouble sticking with the GOP ticket:

As we head into the final week of the presidential campaign, it's becoming apparent that Sarah Palin may have solidified John McCain's appeal with his GOP base, but the VP pick has wreaked havoc with McCain's support -- such as it is -- in Hollywood. I was just on the phone with manager-producer Eric Gold, who handles Jim Carrey and Ellen DeGeneres, who had been a longtime McCain supporter and contributor, going back to McCain's quixotic 2000 presidential campaign. Thing is, Gold just cast his absentee ballot -- for Barack Obama. What makes Gold's conversion especially revealing is that he is hardly an Obama admirer.

"Obama has done nothing," Gold says. "He has no real experience. I mean, being a community organizer and running for president -- who are we kidding? In the debates, he said nothing -- less than nothing. He's just selling temperament." But after McCain picked Palin as his VP, Gold, who calls himself a "disenfranchised Democrat," began to sour on his longtime political hero. (As have other McCain supporters.)

"If McCain had picked Lindsey Graham or Joe Lieberman, I'd probably be voting differently," says Gold. "But to pick someone of such lightweight proportions as Sarah Palin, that was the nail in the coffin. What he did by picking her was say: I'll do anything to win. He didn't care about the moderates or the independents, which unfortunately meant he didn't care about me. The real John McCain would never have done that. He went against his own principles."

Gold says that for years he stood up for McCain in a hostile environment -- liberal Hollywood. "Obviously this is a town that's not very sympathetic to Republicans," he says. "But his pandering, first with Palin, then with the speeches about Obama being a pal of terrorists, it wasn't worthy of McCain, the guy who was a different kind of Republican. All my liberal friends would say: This is the guy you're standing up for? I was embarrassed. I have lots of doubts about Obama, but everything John McCain has done in the past two months has just driven me back to the Democratic Party."

Gold is not the only McCain fan beginning to break ranks with the Republican candidate over his Palin pick and campaign tactics. Later today I'll be posting an essay from another prominent Hollywood McCain supporter -- who voted for George Bush in 2004 -- who's finding it hard to pull the GOP lever this time around. Stay tuned.

RELATED:

Do Republicans run dirtier campaigns than Democrats?

The 2008 Election: Casting the Hollywood movie

Gasp! Right-wing media bashes 'American Carol'!

Photo of John McCain by Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, the two dark wizards of hardball politics, have already been the subject of documentaries detailing all of their shrewd election strategies and dirty tricks. Now writer-director Billy Ray, who directed the compelling film "Shattered Glass," has a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a film about Allen Raymond, the GOP political operative who actually went to jail after being convicted of conspiracy charges after jamming the phones at Democratic headquarters in the middle of a hotly contested 2002 New Hampshire senatorial race. (The Democratic candidate lost by roughly 20,000 votes.)

Ray has written a script based on Raymond's recently published memoir, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." He's beginning the process of casting the film, working with a contingent of producers who include Generate partner Pete Aronson, who was Raymond's college roommate and encouraged Raymond to write about his experiences. I immediately called up Ray, because if his take on political chicanery is half as fascinating as "Shattered Glass' " portrait of media fabrication, then we might be in for quite a ride.

One thing that fascinated me about Raymond's story is that, like Atwater, he was a mercenary. As  "Boogieman," the new Atwater documentary reveals, Atwater wasn't a die-hard conservative--he turned to Republican causes early on because in the South in the 1960s, the GOP was the party out of power, offering more opportunities for an ambitious young operative; likewise with Raymond, who came from a family of Democrats. "He had no particular political leanings," says Ray. "It was pure ambition. The job and the money was with the Republicans, so that's where he went. He wasn't a holy warrior, just a bright, extremely competitive guy who wanted to climb the corporate ladder."

If you think about it, it's a universal movie character, whether it's Charlie Sheen in "Wall Street" or Ray Liotta in "GoodFellas" or, to use Ray's example, Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer." "He's a guy whose lost his moral rudder," says Ray. "In my script, while the narrative engine is the world of politics, the pulse of the movie is personal. This is a guy who loses his family and the only way to get them back is by regaining his integrity."

It was Atwater who invented the black art of push polling. Raymond took that deception one step further. When he wanted to influence voters in white ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, Raymond would hire an African American voice actor, get him to use his most thuggish ghetto voice and record phone messages, pretending to be a Democratic operative trying to get voters to support a Democratic candidate while, of course, preying on the bias of the person receiving the call. Ray says John McCain is guilty of similar tactics, citing his recent ads portraying Barack Obama's support of a bill educating youngsters on dealing with sexual predators as actually touting sex education for toddlers.

I know what my conservative friends would say: When Hollywood tells a story about campaign dirty tricks, why is it always the Republicans who are always at fault? Sure, the Democrats have gone down to defeat again and again with weak-kneed softies like Bob Shrum running their campaigns, but don't the Democrats play hardball too? Isn't this yet another example of Hollywood bias? Ray didn't flinch. "That's a completely fair criticism," he says. "There have definitely been more movies made about Republican corruption than Democratic corruption. But based on my research and experience, Republicans do it more, do it more effectively and do it without conscience." Why? "Because they believe that their cause is so just that, in a larger sense, any attempt to secure or hold onto power is justified."

Ray insists his script is fair-minded. "I did the reporting. I haven't embellished or manufactured anything. I'm just telling the story and I'll let people judge for themselves." The movie hopes to start production next year, but with a hotly contested election in its final days, I'd be eager to hear your take on the question: Is Hollywood biased against Republicans or do they just step over the line more often than Democrats?   

Photo of Billy Ray by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Hollywood conservatives: Abandoning McCain? Part 2

Four years ago, in the days leading up to the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry election, I staged a debate between a Hollywood liberal and a Hollywood conservative in one of the back rooms of the Sony commissary. As they say at the U.N., they had a frank exchange of views; the charges and countercharges were flying. And even though I'm a liberal, I have to admit that if I were scoring it like a heavyweight fight, I'd have to say--perhaps as a portent of things to come that year--that the conservative won by a knockout.

The conservative was Michael De Luca, a former production chief at New Line who's now an independent producer, having made such recent films as "Ghost Rider" and "The Love Guru." Born in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, De Luca had been a moderate Democrat until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The muscular Republican response to terrorism won him over, prompting him to pick Bush over Kerry in 2004. He's also been a longtime admirer of John McCain. But no longer.

"I'm inching toward Obama," he told me today. "There isn't anything unique about me. If you look at what Colin Powell has said and Peggy Noonan and Christopher Hitchens, you'll see this is a bigger thing with people who believe in the ideals of the Republican party, but are disgusted by what's happened during the past four years. After the Justice Department scandal, the Katrina [mess] ups, the Plame scandal, all of the catering to the religious right, this is about the narrowing of appeal for the entire Republican party. It feels like a collapse of a conservative movement that goes all the way back to Barry Goldwater. It's a perfect storm that is driving moderates like myself out of the party."

Like producer Eric Gold, the onetime McCain supporter who announced his support for Obama this morning, De Luca isn't starry-eyed about the Democratic challenger. "But after watching the debates, I think Obama has the temperament to sit in the Oval Office, which isn't something you feel as sure about with McCain. I worry that McCain today is more in league with the lunatic fringe of the right than Obama is with the lunatic fringe of the left."

De Luca certainly hasn't been swayed to Obama by any of his Hollywood liberal pals. Au contraire. "All they do is scream about Sarah Palin. I'm sure they'd happily embrace a socialist government. They basically have the Janeane Garofalo point of view, which seems to be that Republicans should be put in jail for being Republicans." He laughs. "I keep telling 'em, 'Shut up! If you want my vote, don't open your mouth. I'm almost there.' "

Having had a number of lively political debates with De Luca over the years, I asked him to write an essay about his anguish over this election. Call it "The Thoughts of a Conflicted Conservative." It's a good read, especially for Hollywood liberals who live in such an insular lefty world that they rarely get to hear a thoughtful conservative point of view. Here's De Luca's take on why he's having trouble sticking with the GOP ticket:

As we head into the final week of the presidential campaign, it's becoming apparent that Sarah Palin may have solidified John McCain's appeal with his GOP base, but the VP pick has wreaked havoc with McCain's support -- such as it is -- in Hollywood. I was just on the phone with manager-producer Eric Gold, who handles Jim Carrey and Ellen DeGeneres, who had been a longtime McCain supporter and contributor, going back to McCain's quixotic 2000 presidential campaign. Thing is, Gold just cast his absentee ballot -- for Barack Obama. What makes Gold's conversion especially revealing is that he is hardly an Obama admirer.

"Obama has done nothing," Gold says. "He has no real experience. I mean, being a community organizer and running for president -- who are we kidding? In the debates, he said nothing -- less than nothing. He's just selling temperament." But after McCain picked Palin as his VP, Gold, who calls himself a "disenfranchised Democrat," began to sour on his longtime political hero. (As have other McCain supporters.)

"If McCain had picked Lindsey Graham or Joe Lieberman, I'd probably be voting differently," says Gold. "But to pick someone of such lightweight proportions as Sarah Palin, that was the nail in the coffin. What he did by picking her was say: I'll do anything to win. He didn't care about the moderates or the independents, which unfortunately meant he didn't care about me. The real John McCain would never have done that. He went against his own principles."

Gold says that for years he stood up for McCain in a hostile environment -- liberal Hollywood. "Obviously this is a town that's not very sympathetic to Republicans," he says. "But his pandering, first with Palin, then with the speeches about Obama being a pal of terrorists, it wasn't worthy of McCain, the guy who was a different kind of Republican. All my liberal friends would say: This is the guy you're standing up for? I was embarrassed. I have lots of doubts about Obama, but everything John McCain has done in the past two months has just driven me back to the Democratic Party."

Gold is not the only McCain fan beginning to break ranks with the Republican candidate over his Palin pick and campaign tactics. Later today I'll be posting an essay from another prominent Hollywood McCain supporter -- who voted for George Bush in 2004 -- who's finding it hard to pull the GOP lever this time around. Stay tuned.

RELATED:

Do Republicans run dirtier campaigns than Democrats?

The 2008 Election: Casting the Hollywood movie

Gasp! Right-wing media bashes 'American Carol'!

Photo of John McCain by Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, the two dark wizards of hardball politics, have already been the subject of documentaries detailing all of their shrewd election strategies and dirty tricks. Now writer-director Billy Ray, who directed the compelling film "Shattered Glass," has a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a film about Allen Raymond, the GOP political operative who actually went to jail after being convicted of conspiracy charges after jamming the phones at Democratic headquarters in the middle of a hotly contested 2002 New Hampshire senatorial race. (The Democratic candidate lost by roughly 20,000 votes.)

Ray has written a script based on Raymond's recently published memoir, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." He's beginning the process of casting the film, working with a contingent of producers who include Generate partner Pete Aronson, who was Raymond's college roommate and encouraged Raymond to write about his experiences. I immediately called up Ray, because if his take on political chicanery is half as fascinating as "Shattered Glass' " portrait of media fabrication, then we might be in for quite a ride.

One thing that fascinated me about Raymond's story is that, like Atwater, he was a mercenary. As  "Boogieman," the new Atwater documentary reveals, Atwater wasn't a die-hard conservative--he turned to Republican causes early on because in the South in the 1960s, the GOP was the party out of power, offering more opportunities for an ambitious young operative; likewise with Raymond, who came from a family of Democrats. "He had no particular political leanings," says Ray. "It was pure ambition. The job and the money was with the Republicans, so that's where he went. He wasn't a holy warrior, just a bright, extremely competitive guy who wanted to climb the corporate ladder."

If you think about it, it's a universal movie character, whether it's Charlie Sheen in "Wall Street" or Ray Liotta in "GoodFellas" or, to use Ray's example, Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer." "He's a guy whose lost his moral rudder," says Ray. "In my script, while the narrative engine is the world of politics, the pulse of the movie is personal. This is a guy who loses his family and the only way to get them back is by regaining his integrity."

It was Atwater who invented the black art of push polling. Raymond took that deception one step further. When he wanted to influence voters in white ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, Raymond would hire an African American voice actor, get him to use his most thuggish ghetto voice and record phone messages, pretending to be a Democratic operative trying to get voters to support a Democratic candidate while, of course, preying on the bias of the person receiving the call. Ray says John McCain is guilty of similar tactics, citing his recent ads portraying Barack Obama's support of a bill educating youngsters on dealing with sexual predators as actually touting sex education for toddlers.

I know what my conservative friends would say: When Hollywood tells a story about campaign dirty tricks, why is it always the Republicans who are always at fault? Sure, the Democrats have gone down to defeat again and again with weak-kneed softies like Bob Shrum running their campaigns, but don't the Democrats play hardball too? Isn't this yet another example of Hollywood bias? Ray didn't flinch. "That's a completely fair criticism," he says. "There have definitely been more movies made about Republican corruption than Democratic corruption. But based on my research and experience, Republicans do it more, do it more effectively and do it without conscience." Why? "Because they believe that their cause is so just that, in a larger sense, any attempt to secure or hold onto power is justified."

Ray insists his script is fair-minded. "I did the reporting. I haven't embellished or manufactured anything. I'm just telling the story and I'll let people judge for themselves." The movie hopes to start production next year, but with a hotly contested election in its final days, I'd be eager to hear your take on the question: Is Hollywood biased against Republicans or do they just step over the line more often than Democrats?   

Photo of Billy Ray by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Hollywood conservatives: Abandoning McCain?

As we head into the final week of the presidential campaign, it's becoming apparent that Sarah Palin may have solidified John McCain's appeal with his GOP base, but the VP pick has wreaked havoc with McCain's support -- such as it is -- in Hollywood. I was just on the phone with manager-producer Eric Gold, who handles Jim Carrey and Ellen DeGeneres, who had been a longtime McCain supporter and contributor, going back to McCain's quixotic 2000 presidential campaign. Thing is, Gold just cast his absentee ballot -- for Barack Obama. What makes Gold's conversion especially revealing is that he is hardly an Obama admirer.

"Obama has done nothing," Gold says. "He has no real experience. I mean, being a community organizer and running for president -- who are we kidding? In the debates, he said nothing -- less than nothing. He's just selling temperament." But after McCain picked Palin as his VP, Gold, who calls himself a "disenfranchised Democrat," began to sour on his longtime political hero. (As have other McCain supporters.)

"If McCain had picked Lindsey Graham or Joe Lieberman, I'd probably be voting differently," says Gold. "But to pick someone of such lightweight proportions as Sarah Palin, that was the nail in the coffin. What he did by picking her was say: I'll do anything to win. He didn't care about the moderates or the independents, which unfortunately meant he didn't care about me. The real John McCain would never have done that. He went against his own principles."

Gold says that for years he stood up for McCain in a hostile environment -- liberal Hollywood. "Obviously this is a town that's not very sympathetic to Republicans," he says. "But his pandering, first with Palin, then with the speeches about Obama being a pal of terrorists, it wasn't worthy of McCain, the guy who was a different kind of Republican. All my liberal friends would say: This is the guy you're standing up for? I was embarrassed. I have lots of doubts about Obama, but everything John McCain has done in the past two months has just driven me back to the Democratic Party."

Gold is not the only McCain fan beginning to break ranks with the Republican candidate over his Palin pick and campaign tactics. Later today I'll be posting an essay from another prominent Hollywood McCain supporter -- who voted for George Bush in 2004 -- who's finding it hard to pull the GOP lever this time around. Stay tuned.

RELATED:

Do Republicans run dirtier campaigns than Democrats?

The 2008 Election: Casting the Hollywood movie

Gasp! Right-wing media bashes 'American Carol'!

Photo of John McCain by Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, the two dark wizards of hardball politics, have already been the subject of documentaries detailing all of their shrewd election strategies and dirty tricks. Now writer-director Billy Ray, who directed the compelling film "Shattered Glass," has a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a film about Allen Raymond, the GOP political operative who actually went to jail after being convicted of conspiracy charges after jamming the phones at Democratic headquarters in the middle of a hotly contested 2002 New Hampshire senatorial race. (The Democratic candidate lost by roughly 20,000 votes.)

Ray has written a script based on Raymond's recently published memoir, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." He's beginning the process of casting the film, working with a contingent of producers who include Generate partner Pete Aronson, who was Raymond's college roommate and encouraged Raymond to write about his experiences. I immediately called up Ray, because if his take on political chicanery is half as fascinating as "Shattered Glass' " portrait of media fabrication, then we might be in for quite a ride.

One thing that fascinated me about Raymond's story is that, like Atwater, he was a mercenary. As  "Boogieman," the new Atwater documentary reveals, Atwater wasn't a die-hard conservative--he turned to Republican causes early on because in the South in the 1960s, the GOP was the party out of power, offering more opportunities for an ambitious young operative; likewise with Raymond, who came from a family of Democrats. "He had no particular political leanings," says Ray. "It was pure ambition. The job and the money was with the Republicans, so that's where he went. He wasn't a holy warrior, just a bright, extremely competitive guy who wanted to climb the corporate ladder."

If you think about it, it's a universal movie character, whether it's Charlie Sheen in "Wall Street" or Ray Liotta in "GoodFellas" or, to use Ray's example, Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer." "He's a guy whose lost his moral rudder," says Ray. "In my script, while the narrative engine is the world of politics, the pulse of the movie is personal. This is a guy who loses his family and the only way to get them back is by regaining his integrity."

It was Atwater who invented the black art of push polling. Raymond took that deception one step further. When he wanted to influence voters in white ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, Raymond would hire an African American voice actor, get him to use his most thuggish ghetto voice and record phone messages, pretending to be a Democratic operative trying to get voters to support a Democratic candidate while, of course, preying on the bias of the person receiving the call. Ray says John McCain is guilty of similar tactics, citing his recent ads portraying Barack Obama's support of a bill educating youngsters on dealing with sexual predators as actually touting sex education for toddlers.

I know what my conservative friends would say: When Hollywood tells a story about campaign dirty tricks, why is it always the Republicans who are always at fault? Sure, the Democrats have gone down to defeat again and again with weak-kneed softies like Bob Shrum running their campaigns, but don't the Democrats play hardball too? Isn't this yet another example of Hollywood bias? Ray didn't flinch. "That's a completely fair criticism," he says. "There have definitely been more movies made about Republican corruption than Democratic corruption. But based on my research and experience, Republicans do it more, do it more effectively and do it without conscience." Why? "Because they believe that their cause is so just that, in a larger sense, any attempt to secure or hold onto power is justified."

Ray insists his script is fair-minded. "I did the reporting. I haven't embellished or manufactured anything. I'm just telling the story and I'll let people judge for themselves." The movie hopes to start production next year, but with a hotly contested election in its final days, I'd be eager to hear your take on the question: Is Hollywood biased against Republicans or do they just step over the line more often than Democrats?   

Photo of Billy Ray by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Hollywood question of the day: Do Republicans run nastier campaigns than Democrats?

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, the two dark wizards of hardball politics, have already been the subject of documentaries detailing all of their shrewd election strategies and dirty tricks. Now writer-director Billy Ray, who directed the compelling film "Shattered Glass," has a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a film about Allen Raymond, the GOP political operative who actually went to jail after being convicted of conspiracy charges after jamming the phones at Democratic headquarters in the middle of a hotly contested 2002 New Hampshire senatorial race. (The Democratic candidate lost by roughly 20,000 votes.)

Ray has written a script based on Raymond's recently published memoir, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." He's beginning the process of casting the film, working with a contingent of producers who include Generate partner Pete Aronson, who was Raymond's college roommate and encouraged Raymond to write about his experiences. I immediately called up Ray, because if his take on political chicanery is half as fascinating as "Shattered Glass' " portrait of media fabrication, then we might be in for quite a ride.

One thing that fascinated me about Raymond's story is that, like Atwater, he was a mercenary. As  "Boogieman," the new Atwater documentary reveals, Atwater wasn't a die-hard conservative--he turned to Republican causes early on because in the South in the 1960s, the GOP was the party out of power, offering more opportunities for an ambitious young operative; likewise with Raymond, who came from a family of Democrats. "He had no particular political leanings," says Ray. "It was pure ambition. The job and the money was with the Republicans, so that's where he went. He wasn't a holy warrior, just a bright, extremely competitive guy who wanted to climb the corporate ladder."

If you think about it, it's a universal movie character, whether it's Charlie Sheen in "Wall Street" or Ray Liotta in "GoodFellas" or, to use Ray's example, Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer." "He's a guy whose lost his moral rudder," says Ray. "In my script, while the narrative engine is the world of politics, the pulse of the movie is personal. This is a guy who loses his family and the only way to get them back is by regaining his integrity."

It was Atwater who invented the black art of push polling. Raymond took that deception one step further. When he wanted to influence voters in white ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey, Raymond would hire an African American voice actor, get him to use his most thuggish ghetto voice and record phone messages, pretending to be a Democratic operative trying to get voters to support a Democratic candidate while, of course, preying on the bias of the person receiving the call. Ray says John McCain is guilty of similar tactics, citing his recent ads portraying Barack Obama's support of a bill educating youngsters on dealing with sexual predators as actually touting sex education for toddlers.

I know what my conservative friends would say: When Hollywood tells a story about campaign dirty tricks, why is it always the Republicans who are always at fault? Sure, the Democrats have gone down to defeat again and again with weak-kneed softies like Bob Shrum running their campaigns, but don't the Democrats play hardball too? Isn't this yet another example of Hollywood bias? Ray didn't flinch. "That's a completely fair criticism," he says. "There have definitely been more movies made about Republican corruption than Democratic corruption. But based on my research and experience, Republicans do it more, do it more effectively and do it without conscience." Why? "Because they believe that their cause is so just that, in a larger sense, any attempt to secure or hold onto power is justified."

Ray insists his script is fair-minded. "I did the reporting. I haven't embellished or manufactured anything. I'm just telling the story and I'll let people judge for themselves." The movie hopes to start production next year, but with a hotly contested election in its final days, I'd be eager to hear your take on the question: Is Hollywood biased against Republicans or do they just step over the line more often than Democrats?   

Photo of Billy Ray by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times