Just a performance: actors and politicians have a lot in common

By David McElroy · July 17, 2011

When you see an actor in a movie or on a TV show, you know that the person is acting. You don’t expect that the lines he says reflect what he is in real life. What you probably don’t know is that you should assume the same thing about politicians.

I was reminded of this earlier today when a frustrated friend sent me a link to a story about a married Republican state legislator in Ohio who was found drunk with a young stripper and charged with DUI. The legislator is Rep. Robert Mecklenborg, who has a history of backing strong “family values” legislation that plays well with the GOP voter base. My friend is originally from Germany, and she gets frustrated with American politics at time. Her comment today:

“This is sad. Why are some thinking they are so above the standards they impose on others?”

I don’t get outraged by these incidents and haven’t in years. It hadn’t really occurred to me until today why that’s true. The people who are outraged at such hypocrisy assume that the things politicians say represent something about what they really believe and think. I know better. I know that the delivery of their lines on a political stage has almost nothing to do with how they live their lives.

When I stopped to think about it, I realized that I would have once shared the outrage, but working in politics for 20 years was enough to desensitize me to it. Even on the state and local level, politics is a show. Those of us who have run campaigns and orchestrated various parts of them are no different from the directors and producers of a movie. We create a script. We build sets and then tell stories. The politicians are simply our actors.

Every now and then, there’s an actor who only plays one type of role, because all he really knows how to do is play himself. It’s a limitation on his career unless the public really happens to like him personally. It’s the same way with a politician. It doesn’t matter whether a politician is a drunken womanizer who hangs out with cheap strippers in his private time. There’s a long history of that in politics. It’s accepted and ignored by those in the system unless it gets public enough to hurt the politician’s credibility with the “audience.” If a politician only knows how to play what he truly is inside, he will eventually be shunted aside by the system. That’s not what the state and its political apparatus need. They need people who will read the lines they’re assigned — and the “audience” of voters will reward them for the performance.

To my dear German friend who was outraged today about Mecklenborg, I simply remind her that the mistake is to assume that there’s anything real in the performances you see from politicians. When you watch a great actor in a movie, you overlook the fact that he’s had affairs and been in and out of rehab. If you’re going to follow politics, you need to realize that it’s the same.

These people sometimes start out with the best intentions in the world, but those who get anywhere in the political world eventually realize that they’re just reading lines written by people like me and dictated and approved by people with access to money and power.

That’s just the way it is. I’m sorry to disappoint those who haven’t realized this already.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts