My Brand Is Danger
Now Playing: Gabriel Faure--Overture from Masques and Bergamasques
At least, I'll start saying that to women in bars.

Soon after I thought out loud about discussing politics more often in the blog, an interesting-looking political documentary comes to the Michigan Theater. And then I go see it. We get quite a few of these around here, none of them simplistic (or simple-minded) enough to garner the kind of audience managed by Fahrenheit 9/11. Thursday night's show was Rachel Boynton's Our Brand Is Crisis (2005), a video record of the Bolivian presidential campaign of 2002. Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, popularly known as "Goni," was running for a new term as president (he'd already served from 1993-97) against more populist opponents Manuel Villas Reyes and Evo Morales (the latter, of course, becoming president in December 2005). To shore up his declining poll numbers, he hires a hotshot polling firm from D.C., Greenberg Carville Shrum, to refurbish his image and help him win the election. The result is a cautionary tale of what happens when the US brand of democracy (or at least its attending machinery, like Greenberg Carville Shrum) is let loose on Third World countries. The firm's pollsters, particularly Jeffrey Rosner, find that transplanting the kind of "Third Way" centrism made popular by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair onto an extremely poor country with near-intractable economic problems is a very tall order. Among the usual developing economy woes (asphyxiating national debt, little industrial infrastructure), Bolivia's farmers are heavily involved in coca plantation, a situation that the US flat-out opposes because of its own problems of drug addiction (Morales was able to win last December due to widespread popular anger at the willingness of Bolivia's leaders to toe the line without attempting to ameliorate the situation for their own people). The pollsters have to sell Goni to both the campesino majority and the "white" upper- and middle-class who are understandably terrified of populist reform. Watching the familiar barrage of focus groups and meetings to keep Goni "on message" is rather cringe-inducing, especially when you realize that these guys actually seem to have Bolivia's best interests at heart. Rosner openly sees Morales and Reyes as con men who will sell Bolivia's poor down the river (and I somewhat sympathize, being instantly suspicious of regrettable leftist tendencies to praise Latin American "populist" leaders like Hugo Chavez regardless of their dedication to open government), but doesn't understand the depth of popular anger at the corruption inherent in the main political party, Goni's MNR. Goni wins, but only to have bloody riots break out a year later after his arrogance and highhandedness have brought the country to a standstill. I'm still wondering whether it was worth $8.50, but there's a refreshing latitude to the various perspectives. It would have been all too easy to caricature the pollsters as hidebound imperialists, with the noble campesinos marching silently to Andean flute music, but there's very little of that. Everyone gets their due; the pollsters' good intentions, the seriousness with which the Bolivians take the focus groups, and the opposing plans of each presidential candidate to do the best he can for his country. Okay, maybe it was worth it.