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What’s the most fun you can have without laughing? OK, never mind, make that the second most fun you can have without laughing.
If you answered “sex,” you need to change partners. But if you said Game Change,” the HBO movie about the 2008 presidential election, you win.
While the movie (which airs March 10) mostly covers the McCain-Palin campaign, in truth, so does the book on which it’s based.
And with good reason. The McCain-Palin campaign is just flat-out more fun than the Obama campaign.
So, no, this is not HBO’s way of pushing the Obama agenda by bringing up Palin’s embarrassing, mind-boggling gaffes.
In fact, all of the truly horrible insider accounts came from McCain’s own staffers, who had a big bone to pick with Palin when the election was over.
While Obama’s campaign was all about creating a whole new way to reach voters using up-to-the-second social media, which back then had never been done before, the McCain campaign was so old-school, they picked Palin after just five days of vetting her.
“Game Change” begins with Palin being forced onto McCain by his advisors.
They realized their mistake — handing her the nomination before they even knew, for example, that she spoke in tongues at church, or that she spoke her mind about everything else everywhere else (often in contradiction to McCain) — fairly quickly.
The movie is more balanced than I expected — with McCain (played by Ed Harris) coming across as the guy who should have won and Palin (Julianne Moore) as the big reason that he didn’t.
Palin cannot hide how uneducated she is in history, foreign policy and life outside of Alaska, but the movie also shows her brilliance at touching crowds with her folksy speeches and hockey-mom solutions to complex issues.
Moore, believe it or not, is almost a better Palin than Tina Fey. Fey parodied Palin, but Moore inhabits her.
And though Palin’s antics seem like parody, they are all true.
Here are a few stunners:
* While being prepped for an interview, Palin tells McCain’s staffers the reason we are at war in the Middle East is “because Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11 — that’s why!”
* Palin is shocked that Queen Elizabeth doesn’t make the final decision for the British government. If she’s not the head of state, she wants to know, “Well, then who is?”
* Palin assumes “the fed” meant the federal government, not Federal Reserve System.
* The VP candidate didn’t know why North and South Korea were separate countries.
* The teleprompter broke during her acceptance speech, so she winged it — brilliantly — creating that instant global Palin frenzy.
Fun? You betcha!