President Bulworth

By Walter Kirn

The announcement speech might go something like this: Hello, my name is Warren Beatty. I'm not a national political figure, but I've played one in the movies.

Such a speech became imaginable last week when Beatty, a backstage veteran of numerous Democratic presidential campaigns, refused to quash rumors that he'd been approached by unnamed Illuminati urging him to seek a spot on the national ticket. Citing concern over campaign-finance reform and a certain lack of zeal for supercentrist candidates Gore and Bradley (once considered the toasts of Beverly Hills, but if Beatty should run, perhaps just toast), the leading man whose most recent movie role was that of a Mad Hatter Senator, Jay Bulworth, threatened to inject color and charisma, and a dose of classic leftism, into a thus far pale political season. "The political system is so corrupted, we don't really need a third party. We need a second one," Beatty said, affirming his faith in Jack-and-Bobby liberalism and voicing a fear that America was becoming a big-money "plutocracy."

Warren Beatty--the people's candidate. A joke? In the age of Jesse Ventura, there are no jokes in politics, just long shots with varying chances of paying off. Knowing this, the media took Beatty's comments seriously, filling the papers with stories about a man who may, according to cynical observers, be perversely overqualified for the nation's highest office. He has not only made better movies than Ronald Reagan, but his legendary years of womanizing make Clinton look like a Mormon missionary and J.F.K. like a rural parish priest. A Beatty campaign, it seems fair to speculate, would have no jarring bimbo eruptions, only a flowing fountain of sexy memories.

Beatty was as surprised as anyone by the impact of his nonannouncement, telling a friend that he'd anticipated a 65% humorous reaction but had been greeted with only 15%. As Reagan and Ventura have proved, the only true measure of a candidate's seriousness is how seriously he takes himself, and Beatty has taken politics seriously for more than 30 years. After stumping for Robert Kennedy, Beatty strategized for George McGovern. His political influence crested when his friend and pool-party partner Gary Hart wiped the lipstick off his collar and twice sought the Democratic nomination. Beatty was single, Hart married and acting single, and their buddy movie ended abruptly. After Hart sailed off with Donna Rice into his private political sunset, Beatty remained friends with him while edging away from, though not out of, politics.

Beatty's passion for policy resurfaced with Bulworth, a movie whose depressive Senator-hero first arranges his own assassination and then, with nothing to lose but his hypocrisy, starts spouting truth-telling rap songs about corruption. Was Beatty's performance really a rehearsal? Famously cagey and deliberate, Beatty isn't talking. Yet. But seasoned Washington figures such as Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson's former press secretary, and Pat Caddell, Jimmy Carter's pollster, are already giving the actor a fighting chance at doing for grass-roots liberalism what Reagan did for Goldwater conservatism. Skeptics abound, of course, but one crucial fact about Beatty bears remembering as the story unfolds. He isn't just an actor--he also directs.