The March 6th edition of New York Magazine has an extremely interesting review of a new political documentary. The review,
Our Men in Bolivia, highlights Rachel Boynton's new documentary, "Our Brand Is Crisis," which documents the work Carville and Shrum's firm did for wildly unpopular 2002 Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada ("Goni"). Goni eventually won the 2002 election with 22% of the vote (1% more than surprising candidate Evo Morales), only to be driven from office under massive protests by workers and the indigenous movements. As most of you know, Morales was recently elected to the presidency in a popular landslide.
More in the extended...
"The film's protagonist (Carville only beams into Bolivia to voodoo the troops) is Jeremy Rosner, who looks like Ben Stiller with the proportion of head to body normalized. Rosner describes himself as someone who listens "very aggressively," although he doesn't need sharp ears to hear that Goni--who was president of Bolivia in the nineties--is widely loathed for being an arrogant rich guy who gave jobs away to foreigners. What a challenge! While Goni lights his big cigar, members of the U.S. team explain the need to go negative, in ads and whisper campaigns, against the well-liked front-runner, the ostensibly more progressive Manfred Reyes Villa.
Another review comes to us via Blog from Bolivia at the Democracy Center:
"The film is a portrait of how a team of savvy, Machiavellian US political consultants parachuted into a country they knew nothing about and designed a strategy to return one of the nation's most disliked political figures to the country's highest office. When polling and focus groups show that Goni is unlikely to win any more than a quarter of the vote, the visitors from the US implement a strategy to knock down the support of anyone who might win more than that - in this case then-Cochabamba mayor Manfred Reyes Villa."
A brief trailer can be viewed at: Our Brand Is Crisis (you'll catch sights of both Carville and Shrum) and yet another review is in the New York Times: The (American) selling of the (Bolivian) President.
With Democratic politicians joined at the hip with these morally bankrupt consultants, it's no wonder we continue to lose elections. If voters wanted morally bankrupt leaders, they would just vote for Republicans.