Mr. Showbiz goes to Washington; wish-fulfillment fantasies and paranoid nightmares.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

SEVENTY YEARS AGO, Hamilton MacFadden made a New Deal comedy called Stand Up and Cheer. Quick summary: The president creates a new Department of Amusement because Americans are so depressed, what with the Depression and all. A Broadway producer takes the helm and, in a great feat of central planning, organizes a massive entertainment drive. This angers a cabal of evil businessmen, who somehow are profiting from the bad times, so they conspire to bring the new agency down. The noble impresario rebuffs their efforts; and the country, inspired by his not-quite-Keynesian stimulus, emerges happily from the Great Depression. The end.

Hollywood's most popular products are wish fulfillment and nightmares, and its political pictures offer big doses of both. The fantasy of a political savior has been a movie mainstay from the birth of the talkies to today: If it's not a secretary of amusement, it's a naive congressional freshman (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939), a crusading lady populist (The Farmer's Daughter, 1947), or a Democrat's fantasy of what he really; really wishes Bill Clinton could be (The American President, 1995). It's no surprise that both leading candidates for the White House offer public personas already familiar from the movies. John Kerry is the war hero (his handlers having decided that Sergeant York is a better sell than Born on the Fourth of July), while George W. Bush is the regular Joe, just like you 'n' me, bringing common sense and whatnot to Washington. Kinda like Mr. Smith.

There are certain differences between Mr. Smith and Mr. Bush, of course, among them the odd circumstances under which Bush attained his office: He was anointed after a legal coin toss, whereas Smith was anointed after an actual coin toss.

That's another movie tradition. Modern audiences in particular seem to find it unbelievable that a good man could reach a high office in the conventional manner. Instead we get retreads of a formula that goes at least as far back as Gabriel Over the White House (1933), in which a puppet president survives an accident, sees the light, and starts to stand up for the little guy and fight the powers that be. There's the disillusioned senator who thinks he's about to die, sees the light, and starts to stand up for the little guy and fight the powers that be (Bulworth, 1998); the slick crook who cons his way into Congress, sees the light, and starts to stand up for the little guy and fight the powers that be (The...