1998 in Review: "Primary Colors"
and a little bit about that time I worked for John Edwards
This is my fifth entry in a series of essays on the films of 1998 for my paid subscribers. Click here to read essays on Zero Effect, The Wedding Singer, Dark City, and The Big Lebowski.
Did I ever tell you about the time I worked for John Edwards? It was 2007, and I was one of his field organizers in Iowa. My job was to persuade voters and turn them out to support Edwards in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus. It was high stakes, and low paying, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled to be there. Unlike many of my colleagues, I had TB disease: True Believer. Edwards’ combination of blue-collar roots, soaring rhetorical ability, and progressive platform inspired me to get into politics. I was 27 years old, and I would never be that young again.
Most days found me either on the phone or driving around rural Dubuque county, trying to engage as many voters as I could. It was real, authentic grassroots politics. There were some folks I met with three or four times before persuading them to support Edwards. One family invited me in for dinner the first time I knocked on their door. I became particularly close with the volunteers, those Iowans who were so enamored of Senator Edwards (as was I) that they gave their time and energy to help him win, and were willing to stand up at caucus night in front of their neighbors and vouch for his leadership abilities.
As you can imagine, I had a lot to answer for when the story broke of Edwards’s extramarital affair.
It was hard enough justifying the $400 haircut and the ambulance-chasing reputation, but cheating on your cancer-ridden wife is particularly unforgivable, and for me and many of his supporters, it changed the way we felt about Edwards, his staff, and even the political process itself. My disillusionment stemmed not just from the fact that he and his senior staff lied to me, although I vividly remember the conference call in which Jen O’Malley Dillon, his Iowa campaign manager and current White House Deputy Chief of Staff, assured us that the story was “total bullshit.” No, my problem was that he made a liar out of me. I assured his volunteers, who had welcomed me into their home, that Edwards wouldn’t embarrass them. They believed me, and they were hurt to find out the truth. I haven’t trusted a politician since, and—I can only assume—neither did they.
Because of my background in politics, you’d think Primary Colors would work perfectly on me. It’s basically my story but with a different ending. Henry Burton (Adrian Lester) is a young, idealistic campaign staffer who joins an upstart presidential campaign, becomes disillusioned by his candidate’s sexual impropriety, and quits—before being lured back by the opportunity to do something important. Most political stories center their politicians in their portrayal of power corrupted, but Primary Colors centers the rest of us. Although Henry has some unique character shadings—his father was a legendary civil rights leader, and Henry worries he is being used as a token Black staffer—he’s still essentially just an audience avatar. Whether we work on a campaign or not, most adults fall in love with a candidate at some point in their lives, and then, when they prove themselves to be human, must decide to accept the compromises of politics or become one of those people who thinks all politicians are scum.
It’s an intriguing premise with a tantalizing backstory. Primary Colors is based on a book by an anonymous staffer from the Clinton campaign (later revealed to be Joe Klein). It is directed by Mike Nichols and written by Elaine May. So why is it such a convoluted mess? There are only glimmers of insight in Primary Colors. It touches on many thorny issues vital to American politics—race, infidelity, sexual harassment, negative campaigning—but it only skims their surfaces, and it ends up stuck so deeply in its specific political moment that, twenty-five years later, it barely makes sense.
The main distraction is the Clintonian performance by John Travolta who, as southern governor Jack Stanton, tries to split the difference between impersonation and acting. He dyes his hair gray and adopts Bill Clinton’s gravelly twang, but his so-called charisma is all Travolta. Creepy, in other words. Maybe it’s the two decades of odd behavior and odder performances that have followed, but it’s a struggle to see Travolta as a presidential figure. It would make sense if the film were a bit sleazier or more cynical, but Primary Colors asks us to weigh our admiration of Stanton as a generational leader and our disgust with him as a sexual predator against each other, and the former just doesn’t come off.
As the Hillary figure, Emma Thompson has almost the opposite problem. Her character feels rote and uncomplicated. Thompson swears she did not base her performance on Hillary Clinton, which feels true, because Hillary is a far more compelling figure than what we see on the screen, particularly in those scenes that deal with her husband’s affairs. I’ve been in those rooms. On the Edwards campaign, I was alone in a car with the candidate and his wife for several days just after news of his affair broke. The dynamic was not what you’d think (and that’s all I’ll say about that). In Primary Colors, it’s exactly what you’d think. Seen through the eyes of Burton, Susan Stanton goes through the same predictable series of emotions that he does: denial, rage, and finally acceptance. It’s a classic, banal portrayal of a woman scorned. This is where the film’s framing device really hurts. It would be fascinating to see her process the news on her own, not in public and not through the eyes of the film’s audience avatar.
Nichols sticks to this framing device because it serves the film’s animating question: Should a candidate’s moral failings be held against them? It’s a question that interests Nichols so much he made two films about it: A decade after Primary Colors, he made Charlie Wilson’s War, the true story of a Democratic Congressman from Texas who liked to party and do cocaine and also ended the Cold War by supplying Afghanistan freedom fighters (we would later call them the Taliban) with weapons to fight the Soviets. Taken together, these films comprise an answer to the question they individually ask: Nichols feels that personal impropriety of public figures should be forgiven. In case it wasn’t clear, this is where I point out that Nichols was one of many Hollywood figures who petitioned for director Roman Polanski, detained at a film festival in relation to his 1977 charges of statutory rape, to be freed from confinement so that film festivals could continue to be a place where works could be shown “safely and freely.”
Simply put, Nichols’s portrayal of the sexual politics of the campaign has aged poorly. In an early scene, Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton), one of Stanton’s advisors, exposes himself to a young female staffer. Although he is chided for it by Burton, the film itself is more forgiving. The woman sticks up for herself and is cheered on by the office, while Jemmons and Burton quickly become confidantes. The whole incident is played off as a harmless joke, even as Nichols continues dipping his toe into the questions of impropriety in the workplace. The same female staffer who fended off Jemmons ends up in bed with Libby Holden (an Oscar-nominated Kathy Bates), a brash consultant who quietly becomes the heart and soul of the film. These incidents only serve to reinforce Nichols’s defense of Stanton. Look, he says, everyone’s doing it.
I supposed he was right about that. The 2016 election was centered around the question of Donald Trump’s moral character; those supporters of his who didn’t actively endorse his misogyny found themselves happy to overlook it. On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Al Franken was defenestrated by his peers after a relatively minor bit of propriety, and many of them seem to regret their actions. The central quandary of whether the moral failings of a politician have any bearing on their work has not been resolved, but it has evolved well past the views expressed in Primary Colors. Nichols looks at sexual harassment in politics as part of the cost of doing business, a perspective likely informed by his many decades in show business. He treats politics like the circus, a traveling show set apart from the real world, where the normal rules don’t apply and those who sign up for the ride should make sure they read the fine print. In 2023, that’s not acceptable in politics or show business.
To be perfectly honest, this rootless, consequence-free lifestyle was part of what appealed to me about working in politics. I met my wife on the Edwards campaign. She was a local citizen, not a political colleague. She was also well out of my league, and I never would have had the nerve to ask her out if I had met her at home in New York, where, if she had rejected me, I would have had to see her around town. Being on the campaign trail gave me guts. In my case, the imaginary separation between the campaign and the real world worked out, but for many others, it’s a cause of pain and trauma that gets swept under the carpet in an effort to secure political victories. Primary Colors knows this, but it believes those victories are worth the sacrifice. In 2023, the decent ones among us can no longer agree.