"Dave" and Our Situational Politics

Whenever I write about the decline of Hollywood, which regular readers know I do all the time, I often use the 1993 Hollywood release schedule as a benchmark for all that has been lost. If you pull up the list of Summer releases for 1993, almost every one of the top 50 movies released that summer is an absolute banger… movies you would stop and watch all the way to the end any time you stumbled on one while surfing through the channels on your cable TV guide… back when the cable TV ad model was still a thing.

One of those truly great movies of 1993 was “Dave”, a much-beloved comedy directed by the legendary Ivan Reitman.

Kevin Kline stars in two roles, first as President Bill Mitchell and, later, as regular guy Dave Kovic who happens to look exactly like Bill Mitchell and who is called upon to surreptitiously replace Mitchell after the President has a… uh… a mishap in his office… after hours… with his, uh… his secretary… and winds up in a coma.

(Above: a young Laura Linney and the face that took down a President)

Viewed from our current turbulent times, the movie is something of a time capsule. It gives us a glimpse into a more egalitarian, less angry Hollywood, back in the days before the movie business went rabid… when the overriding impulse of the theatrical movie model was to tell stories that appealed to the widest possible swath of Americans… because that, as everyone in the world understood, was how you made real money.

The movie is certainly political, in ways we will get into, but its politics are subtle… it is subtext rather than text. If you were not a hyper-partisan, as most normal Americans were not in those pre-social media days, the politics were so subtle that they amounted to little more than background noise.

“Dave” (1993), and then later on “The American President” (1995) and “The West Wing” (1999) created a gauzy Federal fantasy land where Progressive Government was always and everywhere a force for good. Where all Americans aspired to a life beneath an all-powerful benevolent Government which did everything for us from birth to earth. In these movies, government never arrests you for speaking out at your local school board meeting. They don’t deny you disaster aid based on your political yard signs. And they never, ever, kick down your door and murder your pet squirrel. These movies built a world where the heroes were always coded Liberal, where they always did the right thing, and where screenplays written by prominent Hollywood Progressives ensured that Conservative-coded villains would always be frustrated by the ability of their opponents to tie them in rhetorical knots.

Most importantly, with the movies and TV shows of this era, Progressive Hollywood was telling us “this is how it ought to be… this is how Government should work.” But to watch “Dave” here in the post-Biden era… the era of Trump 2.0… is to realize that what Hollywood really did in the late-90’s, was to set a bunch of traps for itself and then gamely walk right into them thirty years later.

For instance… late in the film, Dave has begun to fall in love with his “First Lady”, played by Sigourney Weaver. She has even begun to reciprocate, not knowing that Dave is not, in fact, her husband who has suddenly stopped being an asshole. But when Dave’s Chief of Staff “Bob Alexander” (Frank Langella), the true villain of the movie, cancels a $650 million program for homeless children (because, of course), the First Lady takes it out on Dave because she does not know that it is Alexander who is really running the show… sound familiar?

Dave resolves to fix the problem and restore the program in order to get back in the good graces of his First Lady. So he calls his friend, an accountant perfectly-named Murray (Charles Grodin), and summons him to the White House where they order dinner from the White House kitchen and spend the night tearing apart the Federal Budget looking for places to cut.

“I tell ya, Dave, I’ve been over this stuff a bunch of times and it just doesn’t add up… Who does these books? I mean if I ran my business this way, I’d be outta business…”

Exactly right, Murray… this is what we all, both Right and Left, used to call “common sense.” Unfortunately, rather than admit government spending and accounting methods are completely out of control here in 2025, Progressives have given us Bernie, AOC and cockamamie economic theories like “Modern Monetary Theory” which suggest that the only way out of spending spirals is more spending.

True love, it seems, means never having to choose between policy priorities.

But let’s take it a step further, right into the teeth of Progressive talking points here in our current political moment… Murray is not an “expert” on budgetary matters, nor has he been “elected” to anything by anybody… two things I’ve been assured by the Left are absolutely mandatory for any person who wants to find ways to cut the budget and save taxpayer dollars on the President’s behalf here in 2025. And yet Murray’s contribution to Dave’s efforts are portrayed as heroic and on the side of the good.

I guess the critical difference must be that Murray wasn’t 19 years old, nor was he nicknamed “Big Balls”?

But no matter, the next day, armed with Murray’s advice, Dave takes control of a cabinet meeting and proceeds to outline the cuts he plans to make in order to save the First Lady’s program for homeless children.

And boom! goes the booby trap…

What you’re seeing here in these two scenes, is a movie version of Trump’s first real life cabinet meeting with DOGE. Elon Musk, “Big Balls” and their merry band of wunderkind exploded out of the DC swamp one month ago like bouncing betties, to shred the faces of well-fed pork barrel activists from sea-to-shining-sea, and coat the streets of Washington DC with political viscera.

And boy oh boy are the “Elites” in the corporate media and at the upper echelons of Government mad about it… you can hear their incandescent howling as if we were all David and Jack speed-walking across the moors towards The Slaughtered Lamb with a supernatural wolf circling in for the kill.

And the only practical difference this time around seems to be that Progressives are not the ones doing the cutting. Unlike in “Dave” where liberal-coded characters gleefully stick it to their most hated enemies, the Defense Department and corporate fat cats, here in 2025 it is not (yet) Conservative oxen that are being gored. And we can’t have that, now can we?

Notice in particular the moment where the Commerce Secretary seems ready to object to Dave’s cutting of the $47 million advertising budget used to promote American car-buyers’ satisfaction with their purchase of an American car. Says Dave, with Obama-esque condescension painting his face, “I’m sure that’s important, but I don’t want to tell some 8-year-old kid that he’s gotta sleep in the street because we want people to feel better about their car… do you wanna tell them that?”

Well, what can the Commerce Secretary possibly say to that as the cameras whir audibly all around him and the entire nation leans in to see exactly how big a prick he’s willing to be. He can say nothing except exactly what he does say… “no Sir… no I sure don’t.”

Imagine President Biden hauling Alejandro Mayorkas into a cabinet meeting and asking him “I don’t wanna tell hurricane victims in North Carolina that they have to sleep in the snow because illegal immigrants need to be given free rooms at the Roosevelt hotel in Manhattan… do you wanna tell them that?”, while Mayorkas blinks stupidly for the cameras.

You can’t imagine it because of course it didn’t happen… it could never happen under a Liberal President… even though this appears to be exactly the choice that the brain trust at DHS made during the last administration.

Which brings up another trap Progressives laid for themselves in “Dave”… the question of who was really running the Federal Government for the last four years, because it sure as hell wasn’t Joe Biden. Go back to that first clip for a moment, notice how Murray, having found a way to cut the money Dave needs, says “I see a lot of places you could save but I can’t make those choices, I’m not the President… I mean, you know, I’m not the one pretending to be The President…” as if he’s saying… what exactly are we doing here, because this feels really, really, wrong.

On the other hand, Bob Alexander, Dave’s Chief of Staff, is the villain in the story precisely because he is the one who deliberately covers up the President’s incapacitation so that he can run the Federal Government himself… a power-mad Deep State usurper absconding with an authority he was not given by the electorate and which is denied to him by the Constitution. That he does not go to jail at the end of the film is a quirk of movie structure in which it is presumed that the villain being denied that which he desires most of all is a punishment worse than any imprisonment.

We have not yet discovered who was the Bob Alexander of the Biden administration, but it seems clear to most Americans that what was done by those secretly in charge under an incapacitated Joe Biden is exactly the same crime for which Bob Alexander ultimately has to face the music in “Dave.”

At least Murray and Dave Kovic seemed a little embarrassed by what they were doing. That’s more than we can say for the cadre of craven villains who were running the show in Biden’s name, with or without his permission… whoever they were.

There’s a saying that has popped up here in the Tump era that seems quite fitting as we contemplate the politics of “Dave” and compare it to our current political moment’s stranger than fiction qualities, and that is “everything they accuse us of doing, they have already done.”

Indeed.

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