NBC Still Dreaming of a Hollywood President

I don't read Deadline Hollywood Daily for political analysis, but Nikki Finke was right on the money with this from yesterday:

Last night, NBC's Brian Williams and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann had an on-air bromance over, of all things, Aaron Sorkin's writing. Both men, twice on the telecast, compared Barack Obama's Democratic National Convention acceptance speech to a scene in Sorkin's pic The American President where President Andrew Shepherd rails against his political opponent...

Here's the thing: film reviewers found the weakest part of that Sorkin movie was its naive view of politics. As the Los Angeles Times' movie critic Kenny Turan wrote, the pic is filled with "fantasies [and] pipe dreams about the American political system and where it could theoretically be headed". I don't know which is more humiliating for Williams and Olbermann: that they couldn't compare Obama's speech to something real, like nomination acceptance speeches from the past ... or they tried to praise Obama's speech and wound up unwittingly dissing it... or that they think Aaron Sorkin is so quotable.

Obama is the fantasy candidate the Left has always dreamed of. It was only natural for Williams and Olbermann to compare him to those other fantasy politicians which they've so admired, presidents Andrew Shepherd and Jed Bartlett.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 05:09 PM

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