Last night, because I could not bear to watch yet another boring Monday Night Football blowout (41-14? You must be joking. I guess this is revenge for 1986), I watched Frontline’s ”The Choice 2004”, and I’m so very glad I did.
As a PBS documentary, this was clearly framed as a non-partisan examination of the lives of George Bush and John Kerry from Yale to the war in Iraq. But even though the film was constructed entirely from old news footage and equal-time interviews with supporters and opponents on both sides (including the excellent Ann Richards and the creepy David Frum), the end result made John Kerry look like an intelligent, thoughtful, genuinely altruistic man who acted on his convictions even when it amounted to political suicide. Bush, on the other hand, came off as a cunning — albeit charming — politician who acted on convictions he only seemed to develop in a post-born again attempt to court the evangelical Christian vote and pull the rug out from under Richards in the Texas gubernatorial race.
Isn’t it funny how Bush has positioned himself as a man driven by long-held ideals and Kerry as a man driven solely by political gain, when exactly the opposite is true? Yeah. I thought so, too. And I voted to prove it.
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