The film about John Kerry's campaign won't tell you why he lost:
As for the candidate himself, we don't see much of him that we haven't seen already. But there are a few surprises. Kerry the candidate seems tantalizingly less stiff than we remember. As he waits in a locker room for a satellite interview, he pretends to interview himself. It's a goofy, amusing moment. I've watched presidential candidates in this familiar, tense setting and seen them anxious that time's wasting, irritated by a local anchor's gooey snap, bark at their staffs, or even, in one case, bolt from a Marriot ballroom. Off-camera, Kerry is surprisingly at ease. "I don't know who exercised in this locker room last," he jokes with his aides, "but they left a lot of themselves here." Alas, when the interview starts, he snaps back into that familiar wooden image.
If the movie has a star, it's Jim Loftus, the Kerry press wrangler who made sure the photographers stayed behind the rope lines and that the press got on the buses and into their seats without getting too close to the candidate or delaying his schedule.He's manic and insane. Loftus rails at the New York Times for an unflattering picture of Kerry and rags on the campaign's own press spokesperson for her bad relations with the media. At one point, he tries as a birthday prank to get a pony into the room of Marvin Nicholson, Kerry's personal aide and the other star of the film. "Get the fucking pony and put it in the hotel room … if you can't get a pony get a goat but I want it in women's lingerie … and in that case you do have to stay with the goat or the goat will fucking eat the lingerie and the joke will be ruined."
12:20 PM
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