Left hook, right jab

With the presidential election only a week away, everybody in Hollywood has begun to sound like a battle-scarred political consultant. A town normally obsessed with weekend box-office numbers is suddenly full of noisy denunciations of President Bush’s environmental policy and hare-brained schemes to end the occupation of Iraq. Agents who used to only care about getting a perk package for their clients are now experts on how to privatize Social Security. Screenwriters sound like national security advisors. Producers have a foreign policy. At lunch with two studio executives the other day, I was subjected to so much passionate political posturing that anyone sitting nearby would’ve assumed James Carville and Mary Matalin were in town.

There’s only one problem with all these political discussions -- they’re totally one-sided. Hollywood is such a liberal-leaning oasis that you rarely hear anyone take the Bush side of the argument. With that in mind, I organized my own political debate the other day. On the left was Lawrence Bender, a prominent liberal activist and producer of such films as “Kill Bill” and “Good Will Hunting.” On the right was producer Michael De Luca, a recent convert to the conservative movement who’s spent most of his career as a studio production chief at New Line and DreamWorks.

Holed up in a back room at the Sony commissary, seated under photos of Rita Hayworth and Montgomery Clift, the two producers had a lively, occasionally contentious two-hour debate. While they agreed in a few areas, notably that Bush has an awful environmental record, they clashed on a variety of topics, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign ads, the perceived liberal slant of the media, and, of course, the outcome of the invasion of Iraq. The exchanges may not have been as dramatic as Jack Kennedy versus Dick Nixon or as vitriolic as, well, Jon Stewart versus Tucker Carlson, but they did offer convincing evidence that some showbiz folk actually spend more time watching “Meet the Press” than “Access Hollywood.”

Before the debate began, I asked them what events had played the biggest role in shaping their political views, something I’d always wanted to know about our real candidates. Having grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, De Luca, 39, said he’d largely ignored politics -- he didn’t vote until the 2000 elections, when he supported Al Gore. But the 9/11 terrorist attacks set off alarm bells. “After 9/11 you could break down the response to people who understood what we were up against and people who didn’t. And I thought the Republicans understood what it took to fight a war on terror while the Democrats were playing politics.”

The son of liberal schoolteachers, Bender, 47, remembers going to protest rallies with his mother as a kid back in the 1960s. But Bender only became an activist after he screened “Good Will Hunting” for Bill Clinton at Camp David in 1997. Impressed by the face-to-face encounter, he got involved in various liberal causes. In recent years, his home has been a frequent pit stop for high-powered Democratic fund-raisers.

De Luca says it’s sometimes socially awkward for him, being the rare conservative in an overwhelmingly liberal enclave. “People hate Bush so much that you get a lot of people yelling, ‘How could you ever vote for that man!’ ” he says with a laugh. “I have a Republican Senatorial Inner Circle membership card that I keep in my wallet just for shock value.” But he disputes charges that conservatives lose job opportunities because of their politics. “Anyone who says that doesn’t know how the town works. People here are in the business of making a profit, not furthering their political views.”

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Q: So who gets the blame for the partisan divide in the country?

Bender: The president has basically divided us. It was outrageous when Dick Cheney leaned over in the debate and said to John Edwards, “I’ve never seen you in the Senate,” since of course he had. If you talk to anybody in Congress, they’ll tell you the Republicans go directly into their caucuses. They never include the Democrats in any decision-making.

De Luca: But hasn’t [Democratic Senate Minority Leader] Tom Daschle been blocking judicial appointments over and over? Pre-9/11, the president did get bipartisan support for the first round of tax cuts and the education bill. Do you really think the Democrats would include the Republicans if they were the ones in power?

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Q: So why do you think the Swift Boat Veterans ads had such a big impact on voters while a hit movie like “Fahrenheit 9/11” seemed to have a negligible effect?

De Luca: “Fahrenheit 9/11” only addressed one thing -- the war in Iraq. To most families, the big issues are education, health care and the economy. It was a big mistake for Kerry’s campaign to showcase his Vietnam record because it opened him up to people coming forward and disputing a lot of the details. If there’s one thing Bill Clinton taught us, it’s that nobody really cared whether you served or not.

Bender: But Clinton was elected when we weren’t at war. I think it mattered to people that Kerry had been to war and could make good decisions when under fire. That’s why the Republicans took a war hero and tried to make him into a girlie man.

De Luca: The Swift Boat ads weren’t unfair at all. Once he put his Vietnam record front and center, he invited the attacks. It’s up to the voters to believe guys giving first-hand testimony.

Bender: None of those guys were even on the boat!

De Luca: Oh, so you think it’s fair for the Democrats to say Bush is going to bring back the draft?

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Q: Do you think the mainstream media is liberally biased? Do the conservatives on talk radio and Fox News have a bigger impact than the networks?

De Luca: I can cite two specific examples: the ABC News memo from Mark Halperin, which basically says: Help Kerry. And Dan Rather’s story on Bush and the National Guard on CBS. Even Don Hewitt says he would’ve never accepted that story because the evidence didn’t vet out. If you turn on network news, you’re getting three liberal anchors who slant the news to the left -- you’re getting the Democratic party line.

Bender: But you have to look at where the news goes. If you’re in the middle of the country, you’re not getting a paper like the New York Times. In big swaths of the country, when you drive to work, you’re getting talk radio, which totally slants to the right, while NPR stations are being bought up by Christian-right radio stations.

De Luca: So if you don’t get NPR in your car, you’re going to become a right-wing firebrand? I don’t think you’re giving the voters enough credit. The average American watches far more TV than listens to talk radio.

Bender: It’s not just talk radio. The right-wing echo chamber, whether it’s radio or Fox News, is more powerful than network news. Look at what happened to Kerry. He’s a war hero, yet talk radio and Fox totally went along with the Republican spin and deception to paint him as being a fake. And with the networks, don’t just look at the anchors. Look at who owns them, to Sumner Redstone and the guys at GE, who really control the networks.

De Luca: You think Redstone makes calls to Dan Rather? That’s fantasy land!

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Q: Do you really think Fox News is fair and balanced?

De Luca: I do. With their news reporting, I always see two points of view, just as with CNN. Fox doesn’t have an agenda to spin things. They just do a better job than CNN or MSNBC.

Bender: Here’s what’s bad: Fox says it’s fair and balanced, but it’s not. They’ve become the right-wing marketing tool for the conservative movement. You really think you get the story from both sides equally when you watch “Hannity & Colmes”?

De Luca: It’s not like it’s Tom Cruise versus Paul Giamatti. They always have a Democratic voice in every story. What, do you want Al Franken instead?

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Q: What about the invasion of Iraq: Good idea or bad mistake?

Bender: It’s the most disastrous mistake of our lifetime. After 9/11, the president gave a great speech and he goes into Afghanistan, but then suddenly they were saying we were under imminent threat from Iraq, with scare talk about mushroom clouds. But there was just no truth to any links between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. So we’re stuck in Iraq. Meanwhile, what’s happened to Osama bin Laden, the No. 1 threat to our country? All this war has done is create tremendous momentum for Al Qaeda.

De Luca: I don’t believe we were misled. There was no way to know until you got in there, and after 9/11, you couldn’t afford not to go in there. The war on terror goes right through Iraq.

Bender: But look what’s happened. We didn’t put enough boots on the ground --

De Luca: You’re just reading Democratic talking points now.

Bender: Many generals say the same --

De Luca: Many generals who want to get on talk shows. Just admit you were wrong. The Democratic Party voted for the war because it was the popular thing to do.

Bender: We didn’t vote for the war. We voted to give the president the right to prosecute the war and make the right decision, and he made the wrong decision.

De Luca: That’s just spin! Anyone who says they didn’t think Bush was going to invade Iraq is out of their mind.

Bender: But look at where we are now. The whole world’s against us. Just because we’re a superpower doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want.

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Q: I think we have to wrap things up now.

De Luca: Wait a minute. We haven’t even argued about gay marriage yet!