Will Robert Redford endorsement carry weight for Biden?
Robert Redford could easily land the part of a Democratic presidential candidate. After all, HBO’s “The Watchmen” made him president for 26 years and up in the dramatic miniseries.
He’s an Oscar winner, co-founded the Sundance Film Festival and, at 84, still has acting chops.
Redford makes a good surrogate Joe Biden.
Because while we believe that there are those who hinge or shore up their beliefs of who should get their vote in November based on star power of a particular celebrity endorsement, Redford’s opinion piece for CNN.com, “This is who gets my vote in 2020,” does more than merely give Biden a thumb’s up.
It’s a speech Biden should give, if he wasn’t Biden.
Redford starts with a look back at his childhood, particularly moments spent listening to FDR on the radio. “Americans were facing a common enemy — fascism — and FDR gave us the sense that we were all in it together. Even kids like me had a role to play: participating in paper drives, collecting scrap metal, doing whatever we could do.” Good stuff — nostalgia for those who remember FDR, without using the word malarkey.
He goes on about American leadership, the need to get it back, and then lobs a few against Trump, without naming him. “When someone retweets (and then deletes) a video of a supporter shouting ‘white power’ or calls journalists ‘enemies of the state,’ when he turns a lifesaving mask against contagion into a weapon in a culture war, when he orders the police and the military to tear gas peaceful protestors so he can wave a Bible at the cameras, he sacrifices — again and again — any claim to moral authority.”
He goes on, winds up endorsing Biden, and heaps accolades on the former vice president.
These days, anyone — celebrity or civilian — can express their views pro or con via Instagram or
Twitter. Here’s who I’m voting for, here’s who I can’t stand, I just ate an amazing sandwich — our opinions can be fired off to the world at will.
But this free ad for Biden courtesy of CNN is more than just a celeb opinion piece — it uses the magic of Hollywood to conjure up an image of a better Biden, a Redfordized Biden.
It may work. Redford doesn’t have seem to have any baggage that could derail this effort, and he, and this piece, tick off all the liberal boxes. He may even campaign for the Democratic nominee, one never knows.
But times are indeed changing. And the gloss of Hollywood is tarnished, especially as the wealthy set has been able to comfortably ride out the coronavirus, social-distancing in second (or third) homes while ordinary people struggle with shuttered businesses, lost paychecks and the realities of working from home while teaching their children.
Hollywood’s elite are not among the essential workers driving trucks, sanitizing grocery stores, keeping the shelves stocked, toiling in hospitals and other frontlines of the coronavirus and performing the duties of first responders despite the risk.
A Redford endorsement may boost Biden or, as one commenter on The Hill put it, “Why does anybody care what these entitled narcissists have to say about anything? Not many people more disconnected from reality than the denizens of Hollywood.”