Went to see a movie last night, a documentary actually, at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was …So Goes the Nation, a film portraying events in Ohio leading up to the last Presidential election, thus (as Ohio goes) …So Goes the Nation.
It was good, I enjoyed it and it wasn’t what I expected. A lot of people thought it would focus on allegations that the Republican Party stole votes or did something dastardly to swing the vote their way, a kind of repeat of Florida in 2000.
Even the Producers/Directors admitted before the film that what they produced wasn’t what they expected to. Without admitting it they alluded that they thought they might have a chance to record another Florida style election but that didn’t turn out to be the case.
To understand the future of U.S. elections, we must first understand Ohio. Directors James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo had the foresight to see this; during the election race, they brought multiple camera crews there to study what took place. …So Goes the Nation follows political foot soldiers from both sides. The ground-level observation is combined with the insights of top Democratic and Republican political strategists in post-election interviews.
The film captures the tremendous passion, anger and energy evident on both sides, from the hard work of the volunteers to the ugly verbal brawls that took place during late-night rallies. The filmmakers aren’t pushing an agenda or favouring either candidate; they want to examine objectively the factors that produced Bush’s victory.
This is a film about election strategy; one of the best features is the remarkably candid interviews with the all of the top strategists from both sides. They share their secrets, their successes and their failures. They talked about their strategies, which ones worked and which ones didn’t, they really give out a lot of information.
By the end of it I was sitting there thinking that this film should be sent to every Democratic strategist there is and they should be told to learn something from it in case they don’t get the hint. Truth is, they ran a lousy campaign, that’s all there is to it. We can complain about the Republicans all we want but at least they stayed on topic and maintained their focus. That’s how you run an effective campaign no matter what your message is.
So, did they cheat? Doesn’t look like it, they just did a better job and that tells me with an election that close, the Dems could have easily won it if they had their act together, even the Republicans admitted that.
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