There are very few people whom I am unable to separate their leftist views from the rest of their careers. While Hollywood is full of the hardcore left, I still see many movies that have well known lefties in them. Heck, I even see movies that have Tim Robbins or Alec Baldwin associated with them….I loved them both in “Team America!” Robert Redford has been an exception to that rule for me.
Redford seems unable to separate his hard left views from his work projects. This has become more evident as he gets older. Perhaps the most egregious of his insertion of political perspective was in his acting and directing of “Lions for Lambs.”
Now however, I may have to rethink my position on Redford. I think we may actually agree on something.
In an interview over the weekend, Redford stated that if Redford’s Messiah doesn’t win the election in November,
you can kiss the Democratic Party goodbye
The facts are these:
- The Dems should be walking away with this election
- The driving force of the Democrats has become the extreme left, think DailyKOS and Huffington Post folks.
- Contrary to what he wants people to believe since he eeked past Hillary, Obama is the poster child candidate of the extreme left. Every position he took during the primaries (and that he still honestly holds) are unrecognizable to the vast majority of Americans, think late term abortion, gun controls, religious “clingers.”
- Obama won the nomination with support of many new, untested voters i.e. young or previously not voted.
- While taking in the new voters, Obama’s recent attempts to move center have left him “not dancin’ with the ones that brought ‘im.”
The point is that the extreme left is what the Democrat party has become and this election will be a competition about allegedly running away from Republicans and running to their ideology. With the supposed built in “anti-R” sentiment, what message gets sent if Obama loses? I’d say a worse message that what was supposedly sent to the Republicans in ’06. If Obama loses, the left will have permanently alienated some portions of their core base and will never again see many of the “New Voters” who are involved simply based on emotion.
I’ll quibble with Redford in that while I think it would be a huge setback for the left’s ideology, Obama’s defeat, by itself won’t be “The End” of the Democrats. However, if you add the gas price issue to the mix, and Nancy and Harry continue to tell Americans to “Pay more, Do less and Shut up,” I think the risk to the Dems could well be as severe as Redford paints.
Come to think of it, I may not change my position on Redford, but not because of ideology. I can’t remember any of his films that I’ve been interested in since “The Sting.”
