I'm catching up on my Charlie Roses and he just asked James Watson this question: If you had one last lecture to give, what would you want to say? Not such a bad question, but it's the fourth time I've heard it in about three weeks! I think he first posed it to Andy Grove, and now, apparently, if you're a thinker or teacher or just anyone who gives speeches, and you're heading into your sunset years, you can start composing your closing statement now. Apparently he's going to end all these interviews the same way. It was OK to repeat it a couple times, but starting to get really annoying.

But it does beg the obvious question: How do you spend ten years interviewing people in front of the same audience and keep coming up with fresh questions to pose?

(Oh, and if you're interested in his answer, it was much briefer than his predecessors: "Accept the truth." Not bad.)

Watching him on last night's Charlie Rose last night. Sad man. Deep denial. He's gone because he was just too good, pushed too hard for greatness from others. His staff proved inferior, it couldn't take the pressure, and mutinied when it saw its moment. That's the gist of how he sees it. And Ken Auletta's NYer piece was "unsophisticated" for failing to realize journos would have been threatened by any "a change agent" who swooped in to save them.

(If you don't know who Howell is, he was the editor of the Times, who got fired following the Jason Blair fiasco. By the way, he struggled for a word to refer to that incident, finally came up with "this event." So typical of the way he talks. Everything mildly distasteful is converted to euphemism. He missed his calling as a politician.)

I saw him on the show for the full hour several months back and he was one of the most revolting men I've ever come across. He's actually much more palatable with half the grandiosity sucked out of him, but he's a gross kind to spend an hour with.

(And who dressed him for this thing? What an odd choice of the drab bankers outfit--plain white shirt, plain charcoal grey suit--but no tie! The tie-free look might appear dashing on matinee idols showing up for the Oscars looking trendy, but this weathered old curmudgeon managed to come off looking both corporate tight ass and shabby town drunk.)

He spent most of the interview evading the questions, but he did say one remarkable thing: He set out initially to write novels, but got sidetracked in journalism. His compromise was to put off the great love of his life till he was 65, retire from the Times then and pursue it. Now that is really sad. I guess there's no point in even discussing that one, goes without saying, doesn't it? (Though oddly, Charlie made no comment.)

But then I don't think he or the world missed much by being cheated out of Howell's novels. He is such a bland, banal person. If the words coming out of his fingers are remotely like the safe, careful drivel coming out of his mouth, he's just going to put any poor sucker who buys the book to sleep.

I'm actually perplexed about why he would want to write rather than edit. Writing is for people who want to express something--why would he want to write if his main mission in life seems to be to conceal?

(There! I've been wanting to get that off my chest since the first time I saw him on Charlie.)

OK, I haven't seen this fillum--and with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of just 10% among the cream of the crop, I don't see it grabbing one of my precious viewing slots--but Roger Ebert's review is hysterical, a minor work of art in its own right, so the movie has already brought me tremendous pleasure.

Rog can be a bit dunderheaded sometimes, but I like him a lot anyway, and when he gets his hands on a dog, he can really have a blast with it.

The film is set in 1899, as the evildoers are about to blow up Venice to take out all the world leaders meeting there. Rog picks up the action, as Spymaster M confronts The Gentlemen he has assembled in London:

When is the meeting? In three days, M says. Impossible to get there in time, Quatermain says, apparently in ignorance of railroads.

Heeheehee. Nice economy of words, Rog. He might have also pointed the silliness of gathering them at the north end of Europe, if they were needed so urgently in the south. He continues:

Nemo volunteers his submarine, the Nautilus, which is about 10 stories high and as long as an aircraft carrier, and which we soon see cruising the canals of Venice.

It's hard enough for gondolas to negotiate the inner canals of Venice, let alone a sub the size of an ocean liner, but no problem; "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" either knows absolutely nothing about Venice, or (more likely) trusts that its audience does not. At one point, the towering Nautilus sails under the tiny Bridge of Sighs and only scrapes it a little. In no time at all there is an action scene involving Nemo's newfangled automobile, which races meaninglessly down streets that do not exist, because there are no streets in Venice and you can't go much more than a block before running into a bridge or a canal. Maybe the filmmakers did their research at the Venetian Hotel in Venice, where Connery arrived by gondola for the movie's premiere.

It's that trusting the audience to be ignorant part that saddens me. So many artists today with so much contempt for their audience. If you want to set your movie on the streets, for God's sake, don't set it in Venice. And if you've really got a thing for showing Venice, then show Venice. Why go to all the trouble of filming there, only to turn it into something else.

But Venice is not really the point. Idiotic filmmaking and contempt for the audience are. And Rog has such a fun time skewering them, why am I just getting all pissy?

Back to the fun stuff. Rog must have had a ball writing this. Can you picture him perched at his keyboard, cackling his chubby little buttcheeks off?

Later, there is a scene of this same crowd engaged in light-hearted chatter, as if they have not noticed that half of Venice is missing. Dozens of other buildings sink into the lagoon, which does not prevent Quatermain from exalting, "Venice still stands!"

Now back to that speeding car. Its driver, Tom Sawyer, has been sent off on an urgent mission. When he finds something--an underwater bomb, I think, although that would be hard to spot from a speeding car--he's supposed to fire off a flare, after which I don't know what's supposed to happen. As the car hurtles down the non-existent streets of Venice, enemy operatives stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the rooftops and fire at it with machineguns, leading us to hypothesize an enemy meeting at which the leader says, "Just in case they should arrive by submarine with a fast car which hasn't been invented yet, I want thousands of men to line the rooftops and fire at it, without hitting anything, of course."

He should really think about doing this for a living. Nice conclusion here:

I don't really mind the movie's lack of believability. Well, I mind a little; to assume audiences will believe cars racing through Venice is as insulting as giving them a gondola chase down the White House lawn. What I do mind is that the movie plays like a big wind came along and blew away the script and they ran down the street after it and grabbed a few pages and shot those.

Salon's Michelle Goldberg does a really nice analysis of the feud within the Dem party between Deans/Greens and the DLC called "The Democrats' brewing civil war."

Of course the DLC is shouting McGovern! McGovern! McGovern!, but the piece points out that Dean is the most fiscally conservative of the nine.

It's not mostly about Dean per se--though he may well carry the banner for one side this time--it's about the two competing notions of what the Dems need to win: appeal to the middle, or stand for their convictions.

Great passage here:

No one really represents liberals, which many of them find intolerable. That's why there was an exodus to the Green Party, and that's why there's now so much talk among leftish Democrats of "taking back" the party. Even if Dean doesn't share all their views, he courts liberals rather than trying to marginalize them.

While the DLC sees the ghost of McGovern in this strategy, liberals have a different analogy -- Ronald Reagan.

"Elections create what is acceptable or what is the center," says Borosage. "When Ronald Reagan started running in 1980, he was widely dismissed even among Republicans as a nutcase. But he changed politics in America and created the conservative era we've been living in ever since. I don't think these things are a given. They are forged. The DLC tends to think polls are written in stone and people have specific ideas that can't be overcome."

That's certainly how I remember it. The notion that voters are sitting in one place, just waiting for some candidate to join them there and parrot back what they're thinking just doesn't jibe with the human behavior I've witnessed. There's a reason they call the president a leader. People really do hunger for someone to lead them, and when the right person comes along with the spark that inspires people, you'd be shocked where they will follow. It's always been more about the man--and someday hopefully woman--than the issues. That's exactly what I argued in my piece predicting Dean would win the nom on June 30th. And a bit more on it here as well.

(And speaking of women leaders, Maggie was way more conservative than the Brit population, but she drove them places they hadn't even thought about for a hundred years. We could use an Iron Lady on our side.)

Then there's the view that that shift can happen, but it takes a decade or two to build it:

Michael Franc, vice president for government relations at the conservative Heritage Institute, actually agrees with parts of Borosage's analysis.

In the short run, he says, liberal rage is good news for Bush. "In the long run it may not be bad news for Bush," Franc says, "but it might be bad news for a successor. The [Democratic] Party, in order to realign itself in the right direction, may need to undergo some self-examination and a reorientation of what it's all about. Republicans reacted very, very well to their 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson. Even though Johnson beat Goldwater by an enormous margin, Goldwater had more people out on the streets working for him. It was an early indication of a nascent conservative resurgence that was possible with right kind of nurturing and direction.

"This conservative movement really grew out of that," he continues. "It took a while -- first we had Nixon to deal with -- but it finally led to Reagan's election in 1980. There was kind of a 16-year walk in the wilderness, where people who worked on the Goldwater campaign hung together and formed organizations, formed magazines and journals and helped develop foundations for what was to come."

I think there's something to that as well. Those conservative have definitely gotten the upper hand on getting their message out. They built an amazing machine, very different than anything we've seen before. I'm actually not certain how much a hand it played in getting Reagan elected, but it's sure been dominant ever since. Listen to Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who never came close to having the charisma to lead the country personally, but always impresses me with his ideas. He'd be a great chief strategist for a charismatic man who can carry the banner to victory:

"The typical American shares the values of most liberal activists and progressives," says Reich, "but the typical American has been fed a nonstop diet of lies and angry, snide, resentful, bitter diatribes by right-wing radio talk-show hosts and right-wing TV talk-show hosts. The typical American doesn't know what the facts are. He believes that the typical family is getting a $1,000 tax cut. He believes Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for 9/11. He doesn't know that Afghanistan is falling apart, he doesn't know that we're completely unprepared for a terrorist attack. He hasn't been told that most of the corporate scandals of 2002 could happen again because most of the legislation never went anywhere."

All very sad, but all very true. Kind of amazes me to hear a lot of people conceding the election to Bush already. He's really botched all the major challenges facing the country. The nation inevitably rallied around him when 9/11 scared the crap out of us and some people feel he was a good leader in the moment (though he still made my skin crawl). But he rolled into Afghanistan and did a great job in the short run, then promptly made the exact same mistake there we did the last time. That place is going to blow up on us again, and Iraq is going to be worse when it finally holds an election and ushers in a Shia regime that hates us. Neither will probably won't happen under his watch, but it doesn't seem too hard make people aware of how he badly he's bungled it. You just need the right voice to get that message out. And the courage to say it. 

Bush is incredibly vulnerable, I think, but only to someone who can exploit his catastrophic weaknesses, both foreign and domestic. The Dems are so focused on finding the right spot on the policy spectrum, when what they really need is to find the strong man or woman who can articulate their message, expose Bush's weaknesses and leave him gasping for political air.