Directors Adam Del Deo and Jim Stern talk about
their documentary "So Goes The Nation".
(File photos: IFC Films)
It was 2004 in the United States of America.
November 2, to be precise. For months ahead of time many people expected a
high turnout of voters across America. And the people's expectations were
met. In fact, over 115 million people voted in the presidential election
of 2004 between Republican incumbent president George W. Bush and Democratic
senator John F. Kerry. The total was the highest number of total voters
for a U.S. presidential election since the late 1960's. The president
retained his seat in the White House with a convincing margin of just over five
million votes. The election was not in doubt. Despite the clear
overall margin of victory across the country, there was one state, Ohio, the
mid-western state bordered by Pennsylvania to its east, that was very closely
decided -- too close to call in fact. The results were not declared until
the early hours of November 3. John Edwards, Kerry's running mate had made
a statement early in the
morning after the election vote that the Kerry-Edwards
camp was committed to challenging the results of the vote in Ohio and making
sure that every single vote
cast was counted. Less than 12 hours after
Edwards had made that announcement, John Kerry was stepping before the media's
cameras at Fannueil Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, announcing that he had
officially conceded the presidency to incumbent George W. Bush.
While some people remain convinced that something suspicious, if not fraudulent
took place, others attempted to understand how a candidate who on paper seemed
like a safe bet to win the White House had failed so miserably against an
incumbent who on paper was weakened by two wars that the public consensus began
to think were going very wrong. It was this question that filmmakers Adam
Del Deo and Jim Stern set out to address in their new film "So Goes The Nation",
which is playing in New York and Los Angeles at the moment as well as in Ohio.
!["We don't think [alleged voting fraud and improprieties in Ohio] addressed the overarching reason why only two Democrats since 1964 have won. We were clearly aware [of the allegations]."](ohio_files/image005.gif)
"In 40-plus years there's been two Democrats elected president. So the
question is, why is that? I think that what is important is trying to
analyze that question without putting one's own polemic on top of it so that
you're already answering your own question, is that it would be interesting to
listen to what people say and then put together your own piece," Jim Stern said.
"A documentary is never overly objective, and at the same time I think that
. . . subjectivity can be tamped down so that it doesn't get in the way of what
your subjects are talking about." In "So Goes The Nation" the directors
interview political strategists from both sides of the political aisle,
including former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe and
present Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. Various
participants sung the film's praises. One of the key moments in "So Goes
The Nation" is the discussion about John Kerry's statement that he made before
war veterans that he had "actually voted for the $87 billion dollars (for
spending on the war in Iraq) before I voted against it," -- a statement that was
used in a commercial by the Republicans which helped to define Kerry as a weak
or at least an indecisive politician. One of the film's clear-cut moments
is where one strategist on the Republican side contrasts Bush as strong -- even
if you don't agree with him, and Kerry as weak and verbose, without a specific
mantra that voters could latch on to. Add to the mix Karl Rove's shrewd
strategies to ensure that American voters heard loudly and clearly what issues
the Bush campaign thought were most at stake juxtaposed with the seeming
reticence to respond to Swift Boat Veterans For Truth ads that strongly
questioned Senator Kerry's service in Vietnam throughout August of 2004, and
some interviewees in the documentary pointed to these moments where they felt
the election was won and lost.
According to the documentary's press notes, no Republican has ever won the
presidency without winning Ohio, and only once has a Democrat ever won the
presidency without winning Ohio.
The actual shooting of "So Goes The Nation" took just 12 days. The two
directors separately spent time right up to election day November 2004 in two
different counties in Ohio, chronicling the efforts to get out the vote on both
the Democratic and Republican camps. At times their cameras captured very
passionate debates and encounters that got "exciting", though never violent, Del
Deo said. Although there were high levels of passion and often very heated
invective and insulting language, the filmmakers never felt they or their crew
were in any danger. The thing that most surprised the directors was the
incredible levels of access they had to the high-level political officials in
both parties. They did have many camera crews covering the activities on
that rainy November in Ohio two years ago. Miles Gerety, a Kerry campaign
volunteer, Leslie Ghiz, a Bush campaign volunteer coordinator in Cincinnati, and
Evan Hutchison, a VOTEMOB (527 political group) organizer in Columbus, Ohio, are
prominently featured in the documentary. Their stories as election day
nears, happens and then passes, is a study in roller-coaster emotions.
Asked about the opportunity to examine the issue of
voter fraud in Ohio in 2004 and the statement by former Diebold (voting machine
company) CEO Wally O'Dell in August 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio
deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," the directors reiterate
what the focus of their documentary is. "We were already clearly aware of
it. We didn't feel that it addressed that overarching issue of why two
Democrats have only been elected president since 1964. It just wasn't a
film that we wanted to make," said Stern. He also pointed out that there
were other films out there that had raised the question of fraud. For
example, publications like Rolling Stone magazine, in an extensive story
penned by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earlier this year posed the question, "Was the
2004 election stolen?", in attempting to address and answer the question of
alleged voter machine fraud and other voting improprieties.
The victor: The
president with the First Lady on November 3, 2004, the day after the U.S.
presidential election, and the state of Ohio (in red) on a map of the United
States of America. (Photos: Associated Press; Map - courtesy of
Election Maps)
Stern and Del Deo have articulated the position that America should take the
issue of general election voting more seriously, advocating for election day to
be made a national holiday, or to be held on a weekend. Either one of
these alternatives they endorse and are confident that despite the inevitability
of media shaping and influencing the voters' decisions at the polls, that
turnout would be far higher than it normally is in the country. Normally
between 25 and 35% of registered voters actually turn out to vote in elections
in the United States, much smaller than in many other industrialized nations,
including Spain and Italy.
When the directors were asked about what frustrated them most about phrases they
heard most commonly in politics or in public political discussion in America,
Stern was quick to respond. "What most irritates me is the notion of a
liberal press. I don't really believe it . . . I don't think that, you
know, that The New York Times are overly liberal. I don't believe
that Time Magazine is liberal . . . I think that Fox News has a
particular agenda -- unlike CNN -- I don't think that CNN is part of a liberal
press. So I think that there's a way that [the phrase "liberal press" has]
become part of our culture -- and I think that there's a way in which it's sort
of, kind of said over and over again, people sort of believe it . . . I don't .
. . ". The phrase that most seemed to get under the skin of Adam Del Deo
was "make no mistake about it" -- although Del Deo said this slightly
tongue-in-cheek, referring to a phrase often used by the current president.
He added that "I think that politics, like sports for that matter -- is all
about handicapping . . . ". The phrase "conventional wisdom" was really
the one that stuck in his craw. "It is discussed so much that it becomes a
fait accompli."
The question of whether Americans prefer politicians they can relate to over
politicians who are smart, astute and accomplished also arises during the
interview of the documentary's two directors. From an issues perspective
they said, the public seemed to identify with Democrats, but on a values
perspective they identified more with Republicans.
When Stern and Del Deo look for documentary stories they "tend to find stories
that have something to say". They cited their 2004 documentary "The Year
of The Yao", on Yao Ming, the Chinese-born basketball superstar who is playing
in the U.S. in the National Basketball Association for the Houston Rockets,
which was a story about basketball but "ended up really being about
immigration," Stern said.
No matter what the issues are, whether they are found in politics or in sports,
viewers in select cities can see all the big political issues of campaigning and
campaign strategy in Jim Stern and Adam Del Deo's "So Goes The Nation", which
will be opening in Hawaii in November. The film opened in Los Angeles on
October 20 and has been playing in Ohio and New York since October's first
weekend.
Polarized parties: Dueling political camps of Bush and Kerry supporters featured
in "So Goes The Nation." (Photo: IFC First Take)