Occam’s Razor

Beware the Power of Kos

When the historians write the official history of the election of 2004 Markos Moulitsas should have at least a chapter. His site, dailykos.com is the nation’s largest political weblog. To call it a weblog though is to damn it with faint praise. Dailykos.com (or Kos to most of us — the site and its owner seem interchangeable) is really an excellent networked community of progressives working together in virtual and real space to dump Bush, elect John Kerry and put Democrats into office on all levels. In my mind it is a revolutionary online community.

If DeanforAmerica.com (now DemocracyforAmerica.com) got the effort rolling it was Moulitsas who perfected the online political community. As much as I enjoy reading political weblogs like Atrios and The Left Coaster nothing really can compare to Kos’s site. Kos is where progressive politics is happening in real time. And we are not there just out of some sense of duty. We are having a blast. The site is addictive.

He is currently averaging close to 400,000 page views a day. This is a staggering number. It has him and his crew of tech heads constantly scurrying to add more servers and bandwidth. It’s amazing his site does not collapse altogether from the load. There are certainly times of the day (mid afternoon and evenings) when it can be tough to get onto Kos.

Kos was born in Chicago but he spent most of his formative years in El Salvador. He eventually returned to the United States when the civil war there got too hot. He served three years in the U.S. Army. Along the way he accumulated two bachelors degrees and a J.D. degree. Now he earns his living teaching progressive candidates how to use the power of online communities. But I don’t know where he finds the time to earn money. It seems like he lives on his weblog.

What makes Kos unique though is he really, really understands how to leverage the power of online communities. In addition he is very politically savvy. But what I find most astounding is his energy. I work in the IT business and lead a team of programmers running and maintaining a large real time Internet based system. (See it here.) But we are not agile. Kos is fast. Kos is agile. Kos and his team of contributors put out the best progressive content on the web. And Kos has amazing technical savvy.

What started as just another Moveable Type weblog like this blog couldn’t scale when his site got too popular. But he didn’t whine or complain. He found some of the best thinkers out there and leveraged the developer of Scoop for his site. Scoop runs the Kos site, and it is constantly being tweaked and enhanced to make it more useful.

While lots of people try to use technology to solve a problem Kos actually makes it work in real time in a highly dynamic environment. The move to Scoop, for example, was not only necessary and timely but also incredibly smart. With Scoop members can create their own diaries on his site and get them viewed by hundred or thousands of people very quickly. This allowed the number of real time contributors to skyrocket. Instead of six or so primary authors there were hundreds of authors all posting to the same web site. The whole community can read and comment on everything. But Scoop is also smart enough (and specially tweaked) to weed out the numerous trolls that can be found on most websites. It has become a progressives-only oasis. Because of the smart Scoop software it requires no moderation. It just works.

A recent modification to Scoop allowed readers of diaries to recommend a diary for higher placement. If enough people recommend a diary it appears on the main page as a recommended diary. So we have a built in mechanism to see the latest good stuff.

It’s one thing for a politically smart and savvy person to read journals, books, papers and sites, analyze them and post a thoughtful article. On Kos there are thousands of eyes constantly scanning news sources and picking out the wheat for the chaff. When they find something it gets posted instantly as a diary entry. If it gets recommended it becomes a “must read” item for the community. Sometimes this stimulates Kos to take specific action by promoting a recommended diary to a lead article.

The people on Kos are mostly like Kos: incredibly politically savvy and intelligent types. But unlike a lot of political sites these people are not just smart. They are pissed off and are taking action. Kos himself has raised an amazing amount of money online for Kerry and various progressive candidates, many of whom would not get a second glance from organizations like the DCCC. He has raised over $300,000 so far for his Kos Dozen (his picks of candidates who deserve time and money) from over 4300 donors. He has raised over $90,000 for the Democratic Party and over $80,000 for John Kerry’s campaign. But it is likely the actual total is much higher. Not everyone bothers to go through the trouble of adding one cent to the contribution so it can be flagged as a Kos contribution.

Kos’s energy seems boundless because dailykos.com is not his only site. In addition to his personal weblog he runs two other political sites including ourcongress.org, which provides in depth analysis and strategies for those interested in progressive House and Senate races.

His commentary is always right on and highly informed. Yet he is not afraid to use four letter words. The blog world is not politically correct. Nor does Kos have any pretension of being unbiased. He is interested in moving progressive issues as quickly and expeditiously as possible. His eye is constantly on the goal. He is always tweaking his strategy to make sure his goals are met.

Kos is agile, indefatigueable, smart and has amazing political instinct. I doubt this election will be a rout. I am still hopeful that Kerry will win the presidential election. But it is quite possible that if we also take back either the House or the Senate then Kos will be seen a key change agent. He got thousands of us to give time and money. But most importantly he got us to care by connecting us in real time.

At only 33 Markos Moulitsas has a bright future ahead of him. He may be doing the best and most important work of his life right now. But I hope in the future we get to see him in political office. He could well be the Bill Clinton of his generation. He has the right stuff.

September 25th, 2004 at 09:53pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2004 | no comments

No Time for Deaniacs to Sulk … Time to Get Busy

Many of us who supported Howard Dean should be having a mixture of feelings right now ranging from hurt, anger, rage and general sulkiness. But if we withdraw from political life at this time we are making a deep mistake. The country, and particularly the Democratic Party needs our talents and energy now more than ever.

Dean always said the campaign was not about him but about us. By “us” he means the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. If we fail to assert ourselves now within the party then we have failed in our true mission. Getting Dean elected was a great goal but the odds were always very long. There were lots of candidates out there and only one can be the nominee. We wanted a revolution but we got an evolution. This should come as no surprise. Now we must complete the mission: we must bring progressives back into prominence in the Democratic Party. We must make the Democratic Party the Democratic Party of old again.

We should not descend into an internecine war. We should not try to topple the Clinton Democrats, or those who follow the Democratic Leadership Council. In truth the DLC has not done well either. Its poster child Joe Liebermann never polled out of the single digits. The DLC wing of the Democratic Party is already a fading memory. We Deaniacs can be proud that we have rushed in and occupied their space.

To start with we need to continue occupying this space. Howard Dean told us it is important to keep voting for him even though he is no longer campaigning. This is because this gives us delegates at the national convention, and that gives us a say in the party platform. It is there that we can make our voices heard. It is in Boston that we can assert that our party should be passionately committed to equal rights for all (and particularly for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trangenders). There we will also stand up and fight for platforms that call for progressive energy policies that emphasize renewable energy sources and conservation. We can insist that our nation do something real to reduce global warming and respect the world ecosystem. We can also press our party to be fiscally responsible and to work for true universal health insurance for all Americans. We should insist on a fair tax code that does not penalize either the poor or the working poor and requires the rich to provide more of their income in taxes again. In doing we also show that Democrats are truly a party of the people again.

It is also crucial that our country become mainstream again. Our country must be eager to work with the United Nations and other countries to create pragmatic broadly supported international solutions to world problems. We must lead the party and our country toward a longer vision that is not so parochial and recognizes the complexity of the world we live in.

In the short term it is important to work to elect not only a Democratic president but to elect a Democratic congress. We should enthusiastically endorse and fund John Kerry’s campaign, if he turns out to be our nominee. We should work among ourselves, but also with progressive networks like MoveOn.org to turn the election into a rout of Republicans in general. We should be inclusive and let bygones be bygones. We should work with the Kerry, Edwards, Kucinich and even the Sharpton camps to push common goals and values. We need to assert our progressive values, but we need to be nice and persuasive about it.

We need new goals. Our short-term goal must be to remove Bush from office and to elect a Democratic congress. We have the ability to seriously tackle both of these with our existing network. Our long-term goal should be to keep America moving in a progressive and mainstream direction.

Dean for America needs to evolve. It needs to become the Democratic Progressive Network. We need to promote the DPN as an alternative to the Democratic Leadership Council. Howard could be our spokesman, but he doesn’t have to be. There is plenty of new talent among us that is there and could be easily harnessed.

As for Howard Dean, John Kerry would be wise to work to have him on his team. Howard Dean has unique talent and energy that no other candidate has. He would be ideal as the new head of the Democratic National Committee. He should be stumping the country not necessarily for Kerry, but to stir up activists to vote for Democrats in state, congressional and senatorial campaigns. If Kerry were elected, as I fully expect, Dean would make an excellent cabinet secretary. He would be a natural as the head of Health and Human Services, but let’s not rule him out for other key posts. I could see him as Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State. From my perspective Howard Dean’s future continues to look very bright. His talent should not be allowed to atrophy.

February 21st, 2004 at 09:59am Posted by Mark | Politics 2004 | one comment

The Meaning of Dr. Dean

It’s not been a happy time for us Howard Dean enthusiasts. I don’t often get excited about a politician running for office. I wasn’t excited about Bill Clinton’s candidacy. Al Gore’s left me wholly uninspired. But I was genuinely excited about Howard Dean’s candidacy. So it just makes me ache to see him go down in flames.

We were close, so close. In retrospect the mistakes are pretty easy to see. Dean placed too much emphasis on the Iraq war when polls showed most Americans did not consider it a burning issue. It had its place in 2003. It got him noticed and distinguished him as a candidate. But it worked against Dean in 2004 when the electorate started paying attention. It turned out they were more concerned about pocket book issues than the war.

We Deaniacs networked well. But we didn’t network as well with our neighbors as we should have. We needed to be knocking on more doors and calling more people on the telephone. Instead a lot of us spent our time posting our latest thoughts of the day on Dean’s blog.

And the campaign made some huge mistakes. It squandered $40M trying to lock in Iowa and New Hampshire. It succeeded in winning neither. I was shocked when I learned how much money the campaign spent. For a fiscal conservative it was a reckless strategy. Had Dean spent less he could now be carrying his message to those states he is now writing off due to lack of funds. Instead the coffers of New Hampshire radio and TV stations are bulging.

And Dean stumbled frequently with embarrassing gaffes. His primal yowl confirmed the doubts of all the Dean skeptics. Even though the incident was overplayed it showed a lack of political judgment. Dean always walked this fine line. He was always completely genuine. But there are times when a politician just has to fake it. He was too genuine for his own good.

Alas, the candidates I really like are almost always unelectable in the end. Perhaps that is because I am more of an idealist than a pragmatist. So I shouldn’t be that surprised by this turn of events. It is par for my course. But still it hurts. I thought, or perhaps wished Dr. Dean would be the exception, just this once.

And we organized, went to his meetups and sent him tons of money. I never gave a dime to a politician before, but over the last six months or so I’ve sent the campaign $450.

I found I wasn’t a lone voice in the wilderness. At his meetups I met plenty of people like me who not just wanted to take our country back into the mainstream but were eager to invest their time, their money and their energy to do so.

But apparently it wasn’t a critical mass of Democrats. I’m not too surprised because in many ways Dean is a revolutionary candidate, not an evolutionary candidate. Dean is the Democratic Party’s John McCain. Voters though appear to like their candidates more on the bland side. Democrats want decaf, not espresso.

The voters may be wiser than I am. John Kerry is a nice man and I tend to agree with most of his politics. As President he will be 1000% better than George W. Bush on his best day. Exit polls have made clear the voters also are determined to nominate the most electable candidate. Thrice wounded in Vietnam, Kerry has proved he is no chickenhawk. The most die hard military guy must respect Kerry’s service to his country.

But still I ache for Howard Dean. I guess it’s possible he could resurrect his candidacy but I think it’s over. This horse just ain’t gonna win.

But while Howard likely won’t be the nominee this time around, what Howard Dean and his campaign accomplished is still amazing. Howard breathed real life into the demoralized Democratic Party. He got people who were marginalized and disenfranchised to care about politics again. He got us to believe we could change the country. And we will change the country. We will just take smaller steps.

Thanks to Howard Dean the real issues have been addressed. No longer do we have candidates who support our debacle in Iraq. No longer do we have candidates in favor of more reckless tax cuts. No longer do we get half hearted position papers from candidates on the need for national health insurance.

Howard is the best citizen this country has seen in the last ten years. He showed us the meaning of courage and leadership. He showed that by taking unpopular positions when you know they are right you can be heard. It just takes a lot of nerve, persistence and chutzpah.

And he has demonstrated a new decentralized way to organize and to fight for what really matters. This candidacy may end but I don’t believe us in the Dean community will fade away. We may sulk for a while, but we will be back. First we will ensure whoever our party’s nominee is will beat George W. Bush. Then we will move this country back into the international mainstream.

We will take this country back. It’s a shame though that our far thinking visionary won’t be occupying the Oval Office. He would have been a great president.

And maybe someday he will be back, purged of his defects but still blazing with the primal energy and determination. I have not given up on Howard Dean. I hope this experience purifies and refines him. And perhaps the next time he will win.

February 5th, 2004 at 01:51pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2004 | one comment

Report on my January Dean Meetup

It felt as cold as January in Iowa last night. We lack the snow, but we certainly have the bitterly cold weather here in the Washington area. That didn’t stop me from bundling myself up in my woolies and heading out to the Reston Regional Library for my fourth Dean Meetup, even though a large part of me wanted to stay somewhere nice and warm and vegetate.

Of the four Dean meetups I have attended, this one was probably the best. About forty people showed up, many arriving very late. There were no donuts this time and for that I was grateful (since I am trying the South Beach diet, and don’t need the temptation). A lady named Jennifer was our host again. Faces are starting to look familiar. I saw Diane, a lady who lives about a mile away from me and who I met at two other meetups. She reported her birthday bash for Howard back in November was a success and she raised over $700 for the campaign.

The attendees this time though were especially sharp and politically astute. Maybe that’s a factor of being in Reston, a community that is relatively liberal by Virginia standards. We had two people there who described themselves as ex-Republicans. The guy at my table spoke eloquently about how the Republican party has moved away from the one he knew. He said it has morphed into the party of big business. He is shocked that traditional values like fiscal constraint were thrown away in a desire to push corporate and religious values at all costs. And he is mad as hell that Bush went to war with Iraq, because in the campaign he marketed himself as an isolationist. If Dean is attracting thinking Republicans, this is very good news. I hope there are a lot more like these two men.

About seventy percent of attendees were at their first meetup. One couple (who recently arrived from Florida) wowed us with their tale of attending a Dean meetup last March.

The big topic for discussion this month was what happened to the Democratic Party. We largely agreed that the Democratic Party had slipped under Bill Clinton into being a quasi-Republican party. We doubted that Hubert Humphrey would have been pressing for NAFTA or would have gone quite as far with welfare reform as Bill Clinton. Don’t get me wrong; I admire Bill Clinton. But he was a very corporate friendly president. In general attendees at the meetup were both appalled and more than a little scared by how far we have gone toward becoming a corporate-ocracy.

We generally agreed that the Democratic establishment saw Dean as a populist and therefore a threat to them remaining in power. We like that Dean is invigorating and bringing new blood into the party, seems to cowtow to no one, and distances himself from the inner beltway Democrats. We see that as Dean’s key ace in the hole. He speaks from his heart, sometimes to his regret, but his passion is real as is his determination. It is that passion that is contagious and keeps his campaign growing, I believe.

The video showed the staff at Dean’s Iowa campaign headquarters. It was good to see a lot of ordinary people, many of whom are much younger than I am, working passionately for the man. It was followed by a couple minute speech from Howard to us. I don’t know how Howard does it, but he connects with me. When he spoke it was like I could feel the empowerment flowing out of the video screen and into me. He told us we would take back our country. And I believed him.

We know a lot depends on the next month in these early primaries and caucuses. Dean is ahead in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but Clark is taking the number two spot in New Hampshire, even though he is not campaigning there. Dean’s margin of victory in Iowa, according to the polls, is pretty slim. So we spent the last part of the meeting writing letters to Democrats in Iowa and New Mexico.

I wrote my letter. (I would have written two, but we ran out of addresses. I’ll write the other one tonight after I get it from his web site.) The theme of my letter was that Dean represented the one person who would truly take our country back to where we were. Elect any of the others, I wrote, and we will effectively have the status quo. The Republicans and Bush have taken us so far to the right that we cannot continue in that direction. We must now stand up for our values and move the United States toward the international mainstream again.

It’s a daunting task. The Republicans have so much more money, and the primaries will drain time, energy and money. Then we must marshal these resources to win the general election. But it will be tough to come close to matching the fundraising by the Republicans. But after watching Dean last night, I believed we could do it. He makes me believe the impossible. He makes me feel empowered and hopeful.

Underlying all of it is a nervousness about Dean himself. Will he implode? Will he make that one fatal gaff that brings him down? His assertiveness is a double edge sword. It gets him attention and draws people too him, but he is often rash and doesn’t think before saying things. In that sense he is the opposite of Bill Clinton, who carefully measured whatever he said. Unlike Clinton though there is no confusion on what Howard Dean feels and believes. His passion and determination is unmistakable and wholly sincere.

It was an exciting meetup and this is an exciting time. In truth if Wesley Clark upstages Dean I can be happily support him as a candidate. Clark might well be more electable. But Dean has my heart and brings out my passion. I feel nothing for Clark. Our task ahead is daunting, but the victory will be all more joyous when we triumph over the odds. And we will triumph!

January 8th, 2004 at 09:19am Posted by Mark | Politics 2004 | no comments

Report on my November Dean Meetup

This Wednesday was Dean Meetup night. Mother Nature did her best to keep me away. Severe weather made my trip home from work a half hour longer than usual. That left me little time after getting home and find something to eat before rushing out to the 7 PM meeting. The Chantilly public library was not available this time, so our host moved the meeting to the Centreville Library instead. This is quite a bit further from my house. The rainy weather and early darkness exacerbated the traffic problem. It took me 35 minutes to make the drive. You would think that with eight lanes of traffic and limited intersections there would be enough room to accommodate traffic on Route 28, but it was almost all stop and go. I arrived a couple minutes late to the meeting, when I had hoped to arrive a half hour early to help set up!

The meeting was quite similar to my last and first Dean Meetup in October and had about the same number of people: 40-50 altogether. There were however some exceptions. The buzz throughout the meeting was on Dean’s comment two days earlier that “White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don’t have health insurance either and their kids need better schools, too.”

Several people, including many die hard Dean supporters found his remarks offensive. I thought it was a poor choice of words. What Dean was saying was that for Democrats to win, Democrats had to be more inclusive, and that includes bringing in under the tent people who lean Republican. This makes a lot of sense: many people who vote Republican in the south are Wal-mart workers and live from paycheck to paycheck with no or little benefits. Health insurance is something they cannot afford. Dean’s rivals of course jumped up and down on the remark and tried to imply Dean is a racist, which he isn’t. It was just a stupid remark. Dean can do that on occasion. I sometimes wish he were as careful with his choice of words as Bill Clinton. On the other hand Bill Clinton usually seemed stage managed; Dean comes across as someone who genuinely says what he believes. It is that personality and energy, I pointed out, that is largely responsible for his popularity. He’s not part of the buffed and pampered Washington elite.

There were more people who were undecided or leaning between Dean and Clark at this meeting than the last. The pros and cons of each candidate were discussed at some length. I’m not sure we convinced any Clark supporters. A couple people left early figuring they had heard enough.

One encouraging sign was the presence of an African American family. A young son in the family, about ten years old, was a big Dean fan and waxed eloquently about his favorite candidate.

We also wrote letters to swing voters in Iowa. I wrote two letters to two women at the same address, so I wrote each differently and expressed my opinion that Dean was something truly different. About 80% of the attendees were at their first meetup. Those of us who had been to one before knew what to do and started working on our letters while the debates continued.

One area of contention was whether Dean should foreswear federal matching funds. This is the Bush strategy. With no opponents in his primary Bush has already amassed $170M in contributions from fat cat Republicans. In the last quarter Dean collected $14.8M, a new record, but Dean’s average contributions were less than a hundred dollars each. It is clear that Dean’s support comes from average working people, not fat cats. Even so we will need a lot more people to come close to matching the contribution that Bush will so easily raise. I voted to go without matching funds. It’s not that I don’t believe in public financing for campaigns, it’s just that as long as someone can opt out to their advantage, our campaign shouldn’t be put at a disadvantage.

One person asked how the campaign would reach out to African Americans and other communities. Dean has drawn his support from mostly white and liberal people. Our hostess, Geri, said that it was up to us, not the Dean campaign, to make these connections. She suggested we take up the issue and involve more of our African American friends. This is what is really unique about the Dean campaign: it is genuinely people powered. People don’t follow instructions laid down by Joe Trippi at campaign headquarters. At best Trippi and Dean set broad goals and communicate them through their web sites and web logs. Issues get thoroughly thrashed through by his supporters on his Blog for America web site. I find it remarkable that Dean would let his supporters make his decision on whether to forego matching funds for his campaign.

In the month since my first meetup a few things are becoming clearer. A month ago Wesley Clark was a phenomenon and a worry. Now his luster has been dimmed quite a bit. Clark is still playing catch up, and Dean Supporters have proven to be committed to the man and his cause. I spoke with a very nice lady I saw from the last meetup who lives in my neighborhood. She says instead of spending $30 a week at Barnes and Noble, as she used to do, she contributes this money to his campaign instead. I said I pretty much send him $50 every month when I pay my bills. When a special solicitation comes out I tend to send more. I haven’t added it up but I suspect I’ve given the Dean campaign at least $300 so far.

And so we in the Dean Camp continue to move doggedly forward. We are aware that Howard Dean is not the perfect candidate, but he does offer the personality and creative ideas that we expect from a winning candidate. We do hope though that Howard learns to temper his remarks a bit. There is still a year to the election and Dean can’t afford too many more major gaffes. We’ve got to win this one and take back our country.

You can help by learning more and perhaps contributing to Dean at Dean for America.

November 7th, 2003 at 07:46am Posted by Mark | Politics 2003 | no comments

Must see movies for progressives

We all have our own ideas about what constitutes a great movie. For me a great movie must not only be well done, well directed, well acted but it should force you outside your box and expand your mind in the process. Two movies that fit that mode ended up in my DVD collection this weekend. I didn’t seek them out but when I was browsing the DVD aisle at the local Best Buy, there they were and I picked them up without hesitation.

If you haven’t seen either of these movies do yourself a favor and pick them up. You won’t go wrong. Neither are perfect movies but they speak to a larger theme and in doing so make them landmark films, in my opinion.

The first is “The Cider House Rules”, released in 1999. It won Michael Caine a Best Supporting Actor award for his portrayal of Dr. Wilbur Larch, the doctor of an orphanage in Maine in 1943. Caine is the big name; there are no others in the movie although Tobey Maguire would use this movie as a springboard for more mainstream movies like “Spiderman”; and Charlize Theron would soon become a sought after actress. The film can at times be a little overbearing because it rarely strays from the main point of the novel by John Irving. Homer Wells is an orphan who is trained by Dr. Larch to be a doctor. Dr. Larch sees a side of life that is rather ugly but he holds together an orphanage full of abandoned children with perseverance, dedication and more than a few escapes into dream worlds aided by ether, which he self administers. In 1943 abortion is illegal but he performs many abortions routinely for the many ladies who ends up at his doorstep. Homer constantly questions Dr. Larch’s pragmatic approach to such things while in the process becoming a physician without a license. Eventually Homer abruptly leaves the orphanage for a year as an apple picker and lobsterman, discovers his own morality can be plenty squishy (such as when he bangs Charlize Theron’s character, who is married to a pilot).

The film doesn’t have many flaws. The only flaw of note is that Tobey Maguire is probably not the best person to play Homer Wells. He plays Homer with the same sort of happy go lucky expression on his face, and a gentle nature; I would have preferred someone who could better express the complexities of the role better. But the whole rest of the movie really works well. The kids in the orphanage are heart breakers, particularly Fuzzy, the poor kid perpetually in an oxygen tank suffering from bronchitis. Each kid is a well-defined and complex character somehow deftly directed by Lasse Halstrom. The music by Rachel Portman is outstanding. The lessons it imparts about the moral squishiness of real life are relevant enough and done occasionally in an overbearing manner, but mostly it just works real well. Like all of my favorite movies it has a great ending scene that is somewhat predictable but starts the tears flowing anyhow. I won’t spoil it for you in case you haven’t seen the movie.

“Dead Poets Society” arrived ten years before “The Cider House Rules”. I hated Robin Williams as a TV actor but I loved him from his very first movie, “The World According to Garp” when I realized he could act as well as be funny. In Dead Poets he plays John Keating, a poetry teacher at a very repressed, very upper class boarding school somewhere in the Shenandoah Mountains. Professor Keating had once been a student at the school some years back. Since escaping from the school it is obvious that Keating somehow became a fully alive and liberated human being, and he returned to the school in part to open the minds of these cookie cutter upper class boys whose parents largely expected them to grow up to be lawyers and doctors.

John Keating is a role that Robin Williams was born to play. It’s hard to imagine anyone else who could have played the part as convincingly. In the process of trying to open and liberate these minds, he succeeds a bit better than he expected. Eventually, of course, he and the establishment butt heads. There is more than a bit of moral squishiness in this movie too, but again it has one of these movie endings to die for.

Both these movies will always be in my permanent collection. If they aren’t in yours then I suggest you watch them. I bet in time they will be in yours too.

Both films were nominated for Best Picture and lost. In both cases I think the picture that won was not nearly as good as either of these pictures. “The Cider House Rules” lost to “American Beauty”, a lovely and quirky film. “Dead Poets” lost to “Driving Miss Daisy”.

June 28th, 2003 at 02:03pm Posted by Mark | The Arts | no comments