A trio of Oscar winners and a trio of Democratic presidential candidates go head to head on some of the key issues of the 2008 campaign.
What are presidential candidates doing being interviewed in a movie magazine? We like to think they’re being smart. For starters, from a strictly pragmatic perspective, entertainment industry figures donate millions to campaigns, as a few quick clicks through the campaign contribution search engine newsmeat.com will make abundantly clear. Then there’s the matter of influence. When a star or mogul endorses, stumps for or makes the cable news circuit on behalf of a candidate, the potential impact on voters is far more valuable than if they simply make a donation. Finally, Hollywood has produced some formidable political candidates in its own right, albeit all Republicans, from Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger to recently declared Republican presidential hopeful Fred Dalton Thompson, whose service as a Tennessee senator is practically an asterisk next to the fact that he starred in the hit TV series Law & Order and such movies as The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard 2 and Cape Fear. All of the above were no doubt factors when Fade In approached the Democratic candidates (we’ll pursue the Republicans in a future issue), but the clincher for those who agreed to an interview – sans Senator Barack “email me your questions” Obama – may have been the interviewers we lined up to do the honors: Ben Affleck, Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone. Yes, they all have Oscars, but more important, as you’ll see from reading the following pages, they’re far from political dilettantes.
