“No, no, no, the lantern has to be green.”
By Shorter verbatim MoDo:
The White House should have created a war room full of charts with the names of pols they had to capture, like they had in “The American President.” Soaring speeches have their place, but this was about blocking and tackling.
Instead of the pit-bull legislative aides in Aaron Sorkin’s movie, Obama has Miguel Rodriguez, an arm-twister so genteel that The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker wrote recently that no one in Congress even knows who he is.
Yes, why didn’t the White House know who the swing votes were? Clearly, they didn’t — I can’t imagine any other explanation for why Republicans would vote against the initiatives of a Democratic president. Drew Westen-style BULLY PLUPITISM seems to be premised on the idea that Aaron Sorkin scripts are documentaries, but it’s pretty special that someone paid handsomely to write about politics for a national newspaper would be explicit about it.
Bouie has much more.
…and as David Dayen points out, the vote-counting scheme didn’t even work in the movie. The (implied) success of the national gun ban was after Shephard gave a soaring speech at the end, and to be charitable to Sorkin we don’t know whether the speech actually worked.