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The "big" one that got away
Five years ago, I chased the story that Speaker Newt "Family Values" Gingrich was messing around with a young Capitol Hill staffer, but I just couldn't pin it down. Now the tabloids have "outed" him.
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[08/12/99]

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But nothing beats this: Warren Beatty, presidential candidate.

According to friends, and an interview he gave the New York Times, Beatty is apparently seriously considering a run for president of the United States. The story was quickly seized by the media, who took a brief time out from riveting gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Iowa straw poll to entertain the rumor.

"It's kind of an awkward thing," Beatty told the Times. "I don't think anybody should be in a position of having to say, 'Please don't say things like this to me.' I want to be very respectful of the people who have made the suggestion to me." He acknowledged having conversations with Jesse Jackson advisors, and said if he ran, it would be as a Democrat, a Reform Party member or an independent.

It doesn't seem as crazy as it once might have, now that a man who used to wear a feather boa and grapple with sweaty men in tights is the chief executive of Minnesota. But the most intriguing aspect of the Beatty rumors may be the way the idea was apparently hatched.

The trial balloon for the liberal Beatty was first floated by none other than conservative (for lack of a better word) Arianna Huffington in her Aug. 9 syndicated column. Huffington told Salon News that the idea of a Beatty run began at a dinner where she, Beatty and Atlantic Monthly writer Ted Halstead were sitting at the same table, discussing Halstead's current cover story in the Atlantic on Gen X politics.

"We started talking about change and how people are actually talking about [issues that are not on the political agenda], but how hard it is to break through," she explained. "It turned into a discussion of how do you bring about change in a system that is so full of static and a lot of people are saying these things?"

These "things," Huffington says, have to do with the growing divide between haves and have-nots in America. Though Bill Bradley and Al Gore make passing references to poverty on the stump, and George W. Bush riffs on "prosperity with a purpose" and "compassionate conservatism," there is no true champion of the American poor among the presidential candidates.

Enter candidate Bulworth. In her column, Huffington noted that Norman Lear was enamored of the California senator Beatty played in last year's movie -- the burned out corporate sellout who found salvation in populism and Halle Berry. "I don't see out there in either party, on the left or the right, anybody representing the bulk of the American people," Lear said. "The closest I've seen is Bulworth." It was a short leap from Bulworth to the man who played him, Beatty, who's spent 35 years allied with the Democratic Party but no makes no secret of his disillusionment.

"There is a certain knowledge going into this that people will laugh at it," said Lear, the television producer and philanthropist (who is also a member of the Salon.com board of directors). "He would never think of the possibility of his making it. Being elected would not be what it's about. It's really a question of could he help to push Gore and Bradley, the only two running in the center, could he push them a little to the left, where the heart is."

Beatty's promise of millionaire populism comes as many Christian conservatives are threatening to bolt the Republican Party. Desperate for a winner, the Republican political and financial establishment has invested early and often in Bush, even while it waits to find out just what he stands for. In his early stump speeches, Bush has mentioned the need to help America's disenfranchised, which makes his appeal different from the tough-love approach embraced by most Republican presidential candidates.

Beatty's potential candidacy is another example of a tectonic shift in American politics. "I think there is a political realignment going on underneath the surface that the media is really not covering," Huffington said. "Just as they missed Jesse Ventura completely, I think the media are about to miss some of what's happening in 2000." Ross Perot opened the eyes of the political establishment to the large mass of disaffected voters when he captured almost 20 percent of the vote in 1992, Huffington noted. "Until the world realized his tray table was not in the upright and locked position, he sounded very authentic," she said.

"There is a manifestation of something larger happening. You need to look at the turnout going down. There are some very disturbing symptoms of something that again the two main parties are ignoring."

Next page | Is Bulworth the answer?