What’s Michael Moore Doing This Election?

Four years ago, he was a figure of inspiration and division: Joe the Plumber and Bill Ayers in one large package. In the presidential campaign of 2004, one party saw Mike the Documentary Filmmaker as a spokesman for working-class rebelliousness, and the other as a symbol of left-wing extremism: Michael Moore, domestic alarmist.

The reason for the cheers and fatwas: Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore’s impassioned indictment of the Iraq invasion, which he made and starred in. It earned an astounding $119 million at the North American box office, nearly five times as much as the previous top-grossing nonfiction film — his own Bowling for Columbine. That fall Moore, never a shy guy, used his newfound political bulk to get out the youth vote for the Democratic presidential ticket, touring 62 venues, most of them college campuses, in the 45 days before the election. He was such a big target that his enemies and enviers made feature-length documentaries against him, like Michael Moore Hates America.

So what’s the left’s top docu-comic agitator been up to this election season? He’s not as intense a focus of inspiration and rage as he was four years ago, but he’s still busy. He’s published a pocket-size paperback, Mike’s Election Guide 2008, which details how the Democrats can win the election (and how they could blow it). He released a movie record of his 2004 tour, Slacker Uprising, free on the Internet, becoming the first major filmmaker to do so. He’s got a website, MichaelMoore.com, a cross between the Huffington Post and a community-organizing bulletin board; last month the site pulled in 1.4 million visits. Moore’s also on TV a lot, including appearances on Keith Olbermann’s and Bill Maher’s shows last Friday. And it wouldn’t be a year divisible by four if there weren’t a movie out that attacks Moore. This time it’s an intended comedy: An American Carol, from funny-silly (and this time funny-silly-angry) director David Zucker.

Mike’s Election Guide 2008

This smart, funny, borderline-practical handbook, which went to No. 3 on the New York Times best-seller list and No. 1 on Amazon, is brimming with ideas. In it, Moore suggests a busy agenda for a Democratic President’s first 10 days, including drafting rich kids to fight our wars, defeating al-Qaeda by digging water wells around the world, banning high-fructose corn syrup and making HBO free for everyone. He proposes six ways to fix elections — I mean, make the process work. (Oddly, these don’t include putting elections for the presidency, the Senate and the House under federal aegis.) He argues that Bush and Cheney should be not impeached but arrested — make them do a perp walk. He picks 12 Senate seats and 30 House seats the Democrats can take on Tuesday. (Check back on Wednesday to see how the Moore sports book did.)

Even for centrists, conservatives and members of the Alaskan Independence Party, the Election Guide has high entertainment value because Moore is such a fun guy to argue with. Like Rush Limbaugh in his early years, he keeps you alert by mixing humor-tinged facts with deadpan fancy. (Why is Moore not on talk radio?) For example, he posits that the citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire, the first people to decide who the President will be, are actually extraterrestrial replicants of locals kidnapped in 1957. Anti-immigrationists should know that our leaders are being chosen by aliens.

Unlike Limbaugh and other Republican chatterers, Moore is quick to criticize his own party for perceived failures; he’s less a Democrat than a populist-leftie. Many Democrats, like Cubs fans, are understandably exasperated by the Blue team’s string of losses and lame campaigns. Even when things are looking positive, Moore always seems to expect a Steve Bartman moment. On the book’s cover, he raises the question “How many Democrats does it take to lose the most winnable election in American history?” And in the book’s “Ask Mike!” section, he addresses this poser: “Is it true Democrats drink from a sippy cup and sleep with the lights on?”

His advice to Obama: “We need you to be a candidate who will fight back every time they attack you. Actually, don’t even wait ’til you have to fight back … Let’s finally have a Democrat who’s got the balls to fire first.” In other words, Barack should be more like Mike. Yet the Democratic candidate has remained cool, seemingly impervious to rough charges from his opponents. It’s John McCain who’s been firing early and often. Tuesday’s results will show which tactic won.

See the screwups of Campaign ’08.

See pictures of the campaign from Barack Obama’s point of view.

See pictures of John McCain’s final push on the campaign trail.

In the book, which was completed in June, Moore offers the Democrats an electoral-college plan: Don’t worry about Florida and Ohio. Instead, concentrate on picking off New Mexico, Nevada, Iowa and maybe Colorado from Bush’s swag in 2004; hold on to the states that went for Kerry; and you’re over the top. As of this weekend, the polls had Obama ahead in all four of Moore’s battleground states (the Nevada race is the closest). Moore couldn’t have anticipated that Obama would benefit from banking chaos — but he does address, on the book’s first page, the personal-credit crisis, which he sees as our citizens’ response to Bush’s call to defeat the terrorists by going shopping. “So a million homes are snatched from hard-working Americans!” he writes, sarcasm dripping from the page. “THAT’S A SMALL PRICE TO PAY FOR FREEDOM!”

Slacker Uprising

Counting Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko and Bowling for Columbine, Moore is responsible for three of the five top-grossing documentaries of all time — it’s Moore, Gore and the penguins. Slacker Uprising won’t join this company, since it wasn’t released in theaters, and it won’t be a big moneymaking DVD (as of Sunday night, it was No. 2,829 on Amazon’s best-seller list), because Moore is offering it free on his website. There it’s sort of a sensation: 2 million hits in the first three days; it reached No. 1 on both iTunes and Amazon VOD. (“The only return any of us are hoping for,” Moore writes, “is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November.”) No question, the movie is worth every penny — even the $10 price at some video stores.

Called Captain Mike Across America when it played to two packed houses at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, the film details Moore’s attempt to get young people, traditionally the least likely voters, off their duffs and into the polling booth. Slacker Uprising, shot and edited by Bernardo Loyola, is the hagiographic record of that tour.

Since Moore attracted huge crowds at most places, the picture inevitably has the feeling of both a rock-concert movie (with reaction shots of adoring fans, including one woman holding a “Hug me, Michael” sign) and Triumph of the Will (the central figure lands in a city, meets the locals, attends a rally with guest speakers, then wows the crowd himself). Among the guests are Celeste Zappala, the outspoken mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, and a cadre of antiwar diplomats. At some venues, famous musicians are on hand: Eddie Vedder, Joan Baez, Steve Earle and Tom Morello, ex of Rage Against the Machine.

But Moore is the scruffy, paunchy, bespectacled rock star here. And unlike most performers, he has enough fresh material to make each of the appearances included in the movie seem as if he were giving a new speech every night. His jolly, intimate style sells every zinger to audiences who would have bought his line anyway. He’s also an ad-lib adept. When one clutch of Catholic protesters recites the Our Father and Hail Mary aloud during a rally, Moore asks them, “You’re not gonna do the whole rosary, are ya?” and then the more pertinent, “What did Jesus bomb?” The movie leaves little doubt that if Kerry had been half the campaigner Moore is, on Tuesday he might have been on the ballot for a second term as President.

See the screwups of Campaign ’08.

See pictures of the campaign from Barack Obama’s point of view.

See pictures of John McCain’s final push on the campaign trail.

You may have heard how the 2004 election came out. Bush, who lost the popular count by half a million votes in 2000, won by 3 million the next time around. He also took virtually every state Moore campaigned in. So the only suspense in the movie is how Moore will somehow claim victory. He does it at the end by noting that young people, his target audience, voted in record numbers and that they were the only age group to go for Kerry. That’s impressive, Pyrrhically, except that Moore’s stated purpose in making Fahrenheit 9/11 was to end the Bush regime. Mission not accomplished. Maybe this time.

An American Carol

It must be a weird honor, being the only documentary filmmaker ever to be the central savaging point of a right-wing satire. And by David Zucker, part of the Kentucky Fried Theater team (Jim Abrahams and Zucker’s brother Jerry are the other two) who launched the Airplane!, Naked Gun and Hot Shots! franchises and took over and revived the Scary Movie series. Moore probably doesn’t feel flattered, since An American Carol depicts its lead character, one Michael Malone, as a bumbling, politically myopic slob who gets swindled into a plot to blow up Madison Square Garden. But in offering Malone a re-education in “patriotism” and letting him survive the movie, it’s nicer to Moore than the Trey Parker–Matt Stone marionette movie Team America: World Police was. In that one, Moore was bent on destroying Mount Rushmore and so became a suicide bomber.

That’s just the job description that the Afghan terrorist leader Aziz (Robert Davi) needs filled. “It is getting harder and harder to find good suicide bombers,” he laments. “All the good ones are gone.” The group could use a good recruitment video — but who would direct it? “We need someone who really, really hates America.” Cut to Malone (Kevin Farley, brother of the late Chris), who’s shooting a health-care documentary — obviously Moore’s Sicko — in Cuba. He’s thrilled to be in an island paradise. The locals, not so much: they fight to get on the boat taking Malone back to the U.S., where a critics’ group gives him the coveted Leni Riefenstahl Award for his films Die You American Pigs and America Sucks the Big One. But the auteur is not as popular with “real” Americans. He is called a “fat, ignorant, America-hating traitor,” a “sack o’ shit” and, by the ghost of J.F.K., “a douche bag.”

The ghost of J.F.K.? Yes, this is an update of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with Kennedy as Marley’s Ghost. George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer) is the Ghost of America Past, George Washington (Jon Voight) the Ghost of America Present, and an Angel of Death (Trace Adkins) points Malone to the future. From these wraiths we learn that pacifists like Malone would have been responsible for the continuation of slavery into the 21st century (because they opposed the Civil War) and for the Holocaust (you know why). A flashback to 1938 shows Neville Chamberlain signing the nonaggression pact with Hitler, then shining the Nazi leader’s shoes as he and his henchman sing Kumbaya. Finally seeing the red light, Malone takes the Garden stage to proclaim, “We’re in a real war, people, with the worst threat since the Nazis!” And he doesn’t mean the Patriot Act.

The movie finds other butts of satire: “Movealong.com,” left-wing teachers, ACLU lawyers (they’re portrayed as zombies gunned down by Judge Dennis Hopper) and, for raising taxes during a recession and suggesting that Israel practices apartheid, Jimmy Carter; he’s seen presiding over a Surrender Ceremony with China. To prove it’s fair and balanced, the film — which was not screened in advance for the press but was shown to 2,500 delegates during the Republican National Convention — also has a Larry Craig joke. Malone asks, “You heard the rumors about Lincoln being gay?” Patton replies, “Maybe he just had a wide stance.”

Moore, though, is the main victim. The movie’s take on him can be synopsized in the title of a book published within a few weeks of the Fahrenheit 9/11 opening: Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man. (That was a riff on Al Franken’s best seller Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.) Malone is more or less accused of treason: giving aid and comfort to the enemy by making movies that “hate America.” One soldier back from Iraq says that he and his buddies found a lot of Malone DVDs when they captured Saddam’s palace.

But this is a comedy, similar in slapstick tone and comic asides to the Naked Gun movies. And like the police detective played there by Leslie Nielsen, Malone is a guy whose blithe stupidity brings physical harm to those around him — an idiot cocooned in delusion. It happens that Malone’s story is narrated by Leslie Nielsen, playing an amiable but slightly loony oldster. So it’s possible to take the whole movie as a parody of right-wingers’ views of left-wingers.

The movie isn’t as deft or compact as Zucker’s YouTube video this summer of a man being strangled by the pump at a gas station, but it has its funny parts. One is the running gag that Malone isn’t a “real” moviemaker because he does documentaries. “Nobody likes documentaries,” somebody says. “But many people find them restful.” As it happens, Fahrenheit 9/11 earned more at the domestic box office than any movie David Zucker has directed. And though Grandpa Nielsen’s closing argument is that “It turned out that people actually wanted to see movies that show all the good things about America,” An American Carol hasn’t exactly broken box-office records. After 30 days in release, it’s earned about $7 million. The Bill Maher anti-God documentary Religulous, released the same day, has taken in $11.4 million.

Mike the Documentary Filmmaker isn’t godless; he’s a practicing Catholic. And his works suggest that Moore doesn’t hate anybody; he hates the harm he thinks they’ve done to the country he loves. It’s the American way for the people out of power to criticize the ones in power. It’s certainly the way of the American left. Whereas the right usually stays loyal to its public officials through thin and thinner, the left often creates a Platonic ideal that few politicians, schooled in the art of compromise, can satisfy.

If an Obama Administration collapses toward the center, we’ll see if Moore turns his disappointment into creative anger and makes a corrosive documentary on the light that failed. If Obama sticks to his liberal guns, and the right fights to strip him of his artillery, then Moore may for once direct a film that doesn’t attack the crimes of the right but defends a man he believes in.

(See the screwups of Campaign ’08.)

(See pictures of the campaign from Barack Obama’s point of view.)

(See pictures of John McCain’s final push on the campaign trail.)