A classic mix of movies, politics

With the fall elections approaching, Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. John Edwards is going on cable television again -- but in this case it isn’t to answer questions from reporters on CNN, MSNBC or Fox News.

Edwards (D-N.C.) has taped an introduction for Turner Classic Movies to a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War classic “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

It’s part of a monthlong series called “Party Politics and the Movies” that will kick off Oct. 7 with Edwards and “Dr. Strangelove” and continue each Thursday evening leading up to the election in November.

The participants each chose to introduce a film that had personal resonance and, in some cases, had influenced their political views. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) chose 1957’s “Paths of Glory,” Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) selected 1989’s “Dead Poets Society” and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) picked 1962’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

In his taped remarks, Edwards says he selected Kubrick’s black comedy about a U.S. president and his Soviet counterpart stumbling into a nuclear holocaust because “I believe that one of the messages Kubrick was trying to send was that putting this kind of power and this potential holocaust in the hands of human beings, no matter who they are, is an extraordinarily dangerous thing.”