Michael Winship: Relax, 2008 is only a movie

Usually, I hate it when eyewitnesses to natural disasters or other true-life events say to television reporters, "It was just like a movie."

No, I think, it was just like what it was - a tornado tore your double-wide in half. Get real.

Nonetheless, I may be becoming a convert to the life-imitates-art theory. Even though the year is young, 2008 more and more resembles something out of a Fellini film.

Grab a seat and watch New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, imploding before our very eyes. Mr. Clean soiled and stained in a hubristic meltdown brought about not only by the fact that he was having sex with escorts but that he tried to hide the money that was paying for it. I see Michael Douglas playing Spitzer in the movie.

Everything about this year - especially the presidential campaigns - is making me feel vaguely cinematic - like the talking camel in that old Bob Hope-Bing Crosby movie, "Road to Morocco." At one point in the action, the camel turns to the camera and says, "This is the screwiest picture I was ever in."

Here we are in March and nothing is what it was supposed to be. Like someone out of a Frank Capra movie, down-on-his-luck John McCain comes from behind and beats back all the millionaires out to do him dirt, winning the Republican nomination.

Last week, Hillary Clinton beat the odds again and won the popular vote in Texas and Ohio. Ryan Lizza writes in this week's New Yorker Magazine, "To watch Hillary Clinton during the final two weeks of the Ohio and Texas primary campaigns, as she defiantly ignored the pronouncements of her political demise and pounded away at her opponent in one more interview, at one more rally, was to bring to mind Jason or Freddy Krueger or the sitting governor of California, those Hollywood cyborgs and zombies who, despite bullets and stakes and explosions, will not under any circumstances be vanquished."

Unfair, but add to that now-departed Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power's inopportune description of Hillary as "a monster" and you readily conjure an image of Arkansas state troopers storming the Clinton presidential library with torches and pitchforks.

The fact is, this already has been the most interesting, entertaining, informative - and important - presidential campaign in decades, despite the attempt of 20 televised debates to jabber us into narcosis. Never have the issues - even NAFTA! - been so fully discussed this early in the election cycle. And at the risk of stating the obvious, to have the Democratic race come down to the first serious African-American and woman contenders is the kind of plot line that usually only comes to screenwriters in fever dreams.

Mudslinging slurs, fear-mongering and negative attacks are untoward and maddening, but nothing new, so relax and try to enjoy the show. As Michelle Cottle blogged on The New Republic's Web site last Wednesday, "Enough with all the whining. Also enough with all the smack talk about how there must be something seriously wrong with Hillary/Obama as a candidate or s/he would have been able to close the deal by now. Horsefeathers. This isn't a primary in which Democratic voters are having a hard time making up their minds because both candidates are so disappointing. That's what's happening with the other team. Democrats' problem is that they have two candidates who are firing up the electorate, as seen in the consistently high turnout at the polls and the jaw-dropping fundraising figures."

The six weeks leading up to the April 22 Pennsylvania primary may turn out to be the most entertaining thing to have happened in that state since 1723, when Benjamin Franklin first moved to Philadelphia. And the possibility of new primaries in Florida and Michigan - probably conducted by mail - and the continuing fight for the hearts and minds of superdelegates may keep this cliffhanger going right up to the end of August at the Democratic convention in Denver.

Sure, the sheer mathematics of the delegate count may ultimately make an Obama win inevitable. But all sorts of plot twists could occur between now and then. If the year so far is any indication, I'd like to think, as Al Jolson shouted in "The Jazz Singer," that very first talking picture, "You ain't heard nothin' yet!"

Michael Winship, a native of Canandaigua, is a freelance television writer in Manhattan and president of the Writers Guild of America, East.