Empires

Some news from the world of entertainment:

The Walt Disney Company, in a move that gives it a commanding position in the world of fantasy movies, said Tuesday it had agreed to acquire Lucasfilm from its founder, George Lucas, for $4.05 billion in stock and cash. 

The sale provides a corporate home for a private company that grew from Mr. Lucas’s hugely successful “Star Wars” movie series, and became an enduring force in the creation of effects-driven science fiction entertainment for large and small screens. Mr. Lucas, who is 68 years old, had already announced he would step down from day-to-day operation of the company.... 

In a hastily convened conference call with investors late Tuesday, Mr. Iger said Disney planned to revive the Star Wars franchise and release a seventh feature film in the series in 2015, with new films coming every two or three years thereafter. Mr. Lucas will be a consultant on the film projects, Mr. Iger said.... 

Jay Rasulo, the company’s chief financial officer, said Disney’s financial calculations in agreeing to purchase Lucasfilm were driven almost entirely by the potential of the “Star Wars” series, which already has a place in the Disney theme parks. Lynne Hale, a spokeswoman for Mr. Lucas, said he was on a flight back to San Francisco from Los Angeles and could not immediately be reached. “It’s now time for me to pass ‘Star Wars’ on to a new generation of filmmakers,” Mr. Lucas said in a statement.

Honestly, the truth is the best time for that was probably about 15 or 20 years ago. But here we are.

My initial reaction to this news was that it was as if Lucas, having dug up a much loved corpse and drawn a mustache on it and put it in a silly costume before re-interring it, decided to let a bunch of goons pay him money to dig it up again for some group necrophilia. But on reflection, I agree with the emerging consensus that Disney probably will do a good, or good-enough, job with the Star Wars franchise, just as they seem to be doing with their Marvel properties. One friend suggests that they'll let a dozen of the best filmmakers of our generation fight it out to tell great Star Wars stories; another predicts that we'll all go through a cycle of overexcitement and disappointment as news leaks through the production cycle, before the first movie finally comes out and we all agree that it's better than the prequels though obviously not close to the original trilogy. 

I agree with that, and I can't imagine that I won't see the films. But I still wish they'd left it to rest. Maybe it's the incredible disappointment I felt with Episode I in particular, after waiting 16 years for that moment of the lights going dark and the Lucasfilm logo and the 20th Century Fox fanfare to sound; maybe it's just impending and inevitable grumpy-old-man-ness. Yet the sense, irrational but undeniable, is that something is lost every time they go back to this particular well. 

I've always said that Star Wars--the original trilogy--was the single best thing about growing up when I did. For all his flaws as an artist, Lucas succeeded completely in his goal of creating mythology for a new generation, and I don't doubt that those films influenced me in ways I couldn't possibly understand. I know that making more doesn't, can't, diminish the power of the first three; they remain fixed in memory (even if Lucas can't stop futzing with them in various infuriating ways), and nothing can change that my mom's greatest act of parenting through the first 39-odd years of my life was those four straight Wednesdays in 1977 when she took me to matinee showings of Star Wars. 

I guess a generous gloss on what I'm saying here is that it would be nice for younger generations to have their own cultural touchstones, and for entertainment conglomerates to show more faith that the artists of today can bring them into being. A related point might be that the endless perpetuation of franchises must exert some kind of creative opportunity cost, in terms of what else those great filmmakers might have worked on. It's also clear that Star Wars was always, in addition to much else, a franchise; from the start, Lucas had ideas about how to perpetuate the series in various media, including print. But there's a difference between knowing this on an intellectual level and being faced with it for, quite possibly, the remainder of my life and beyond. 

The Big Split Scenario

Everyone seems increasingly worried about an election resolution in which President Obama wins in the electoral college, and thus secures a second term, while losing the popular vote. Notwithstanding the possible implications for electoral reform--the option I think I'd like to see is adding an electoral vote  bonus for winning the popular vote--and putting aside the fact that I clearly am hoping for the president to be returned to office anyway, I decided I'm fine with this, should it come to pass. Here's why.

In 2008, Obama won the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton in a somewhat similar way. His campaign organized the hell out of early caucus states, which generally saw turnout of fewer registered Democrats, claimed a disproportionate share of delegates and built up a large lead. That lead held even when Hillary beat him soundly in primary states, in part because you did better, delegate-wise, by losing 55 percent to 45 percent in California or Texas with a few million Democrats voting, than losing 70-30 in North Dakota caucuses. (I'm pulling these numbers and states at random, but pretty sure the argument holds.) Obama won enough primaries to have an argument for popular legitimacy among registered Democrats who cast votes that winter and spring, but he and his team built their strategy to win the contest according to the rules clearly set forth by the Party.

Same deal here. Barring something crazy happening, Obama won't come close to his popular vote margin from four years ago because in pretty much every large safe Democratic state--New York, California, probably Illinois--his percentage win will be much smaller as disaffected or lazy Democrats rightly conclude their votes aren't "needed," and will stay home. (The same is true of Republicans in safe red states, but other than Texas there just aren't very many big ones--plus I suspect that there's more impetus to vote out an incumbent, even in a state you know will go that way, than to return one.)

Knowing that 270 electoral votes, not 50.1 percent of ballots cast, is what matters, the Obama campaign has thrown everything in the small number of states where the outcome is in question. It logically follows that turnout will be higher in those states than in the noncompetitive ones. Were the rules different--if popular vote was the determinant--the campaign (both campaigns) would look to run up their margins in the large safe states, and given what we know about the efficacy of their Obama campaign, they'd probably be able to do so. In the scenario we're considering, it can and would be argued, plausibly, that millions of non-voters favored the president; were they "needed," he probably could have had most of them. (Again, this is also true for Romney and the Republicans, but there seem to be fewer of them.)

Obama's team matches its strategy to the rules of the game. The resentment that will attach to him and the Democratic campaign apparatus if he wins the electoral college while receiving fewer votes would be more properly directed toward the Founders.

There's a second component to my thinking here, less important but probably worth noting. If Romney does get a popular vote majority while losing the electoral college, my strong guess is that it will be closer to the half-million votes of Al Gore's plurality in 2000 than the two and a half million vote advantage George W. Bush had in 2004. Bush in 2001 was a minority president, but just barely. (The problem I and, I think, millions of other Democrats had with the outcome in 2000 wasn't so much that Bush lost the popular vote, but that we think he really lost Florida under a fair count, which never actually happened.) Had 50,000 Ohio votes switched in 2004, John Kerry would have won the presidency despite a much larger popular disadvantage.

As Josh Marshall and others have noted, concerns that Obama would "lack legitimacy" in the eyes of Republicans if he won a second term despite losing the popular vote are risible mostly because they didn't grant his legitimacy even when he won big in 2008. ("ACORN stole it for him!") Given everything at stake in this election--whether we'll retain the near-complete social safety net reinforced with Obamacare, whether we'll continue moving toward full equality based on sexual orientation, whether we get back on a path toward fiscal sanity through devastating cuts alone or a blend of spending reductions and tax adjustments--it's tempting to say that an Obama win in any form is acceptable. But the inevitable efforts to deny his win if he draws fewer popular votes are specious anyway, and should draw no response other than "don't hate the player, hate the game."