Reading Christopher Benfey’s latest NYRBlog post, “Posing
for the Senate,” was more amusing than I anticipated it would be; but it
was also more than a little disconcerting. He did a good job of warranting his
conception of the Massachusetts Senate race between Elizabeth Warren and Scott
Brown as a remake of Adam’s Rib. My guess, however, is that the analogy
will be lost on a major portion of the Massachusetts electorate, on the grounds
that they have never heard of the movie, let alone seen it.
That would sort of deflate the message Benfey was trying to
deliver, which is his suggestion that the voters are looking for authenticity,
rather than “posing.” I cannot conceive of any election that has ever been
grounded in authenticity; and, of course, the whole point of Adam’s Rib
is that our adversarial legal system is such that juries are more likely to
respond to “poses” than to authenticated facts. The Massachusetts Senatorial election
is not about which candidate is more likely to improve the quality of life for
the state’s residents. It is about the goals of the respective political
parties to establish a strong majority in the Senate. In other words it is
about which party (if either) will have a firm lock on power, through which it
can then command allegiance from its members. The voters simply do not figure
into that equation, whether or not they recognize authenticity or care about
doing so.
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