By Michael Nelson
Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? is the question, and the answer is ... hard to say. Jeff Smith, the brash young hero of the new documentary film by Frank Popper, came tantalizingly close to winning the 2004 Democratic primary in Missouri’s third Congressional district: He finished second in a 10-candidate field, less than 2 percentage points behind the winner. But then Tantalus came close to plucking the fruit from the tree too. It was that very closeness that made the impossibility of his ever getting a piece so cruelly apparent.
The third district, which spans parts of St. Louis and its suburbs, had been represented for 28 years by former House Democratic leader and failed presidential candidate Richard Gephardt. It’s like most Congressional districts in the era of highly calibrated partisan redistricting—so tilted toward the dominant party that winning the primary means winning the election. Republicans need not apply.
The worst thing going for Smith was that most people in the district assumed that the seat would go to Russ Carnahan, a state senator and, more important by far, the son of former Governor Mel Carnahan and former Senator Jean Carnahan. “I’d like to vote for you,” one voter tells Smith, “but I’m afraid you’re not going to make it because too many people are going to vote for Carnahan.” Carnahan’s mother works her national political database to raise money for him in huge quantities; Smith’s mom tells him to get a stable job and not to ask his aunt, uncle, or cousins for money.
The best thing going for Smith, in addition to a bottomless well of idealism and ambition, was that Carnahan is an empty suit, a duller-than-dishwater speaker who is little more than the last name on his birth certificate.
In a Hollywood movie (think: The Candidate) Smith’s David would have beaten Carnahan’s Goliath. Documentary film makers are stuck with the facts, and thus face the challenge of infusing as much drama as possible into whatever actually happens. For all its good moments, Can Mr. Smith is a 53-minute episode of Frontline pumped up to a theatre-length 82 minutes with about a half-hour more footage of Smith making fruitless cellphone calls than we really need in order to get the point that he’s an underdog.
The film’s most effective moment comes when Smith learns that St. Louis’s African-American newspaper, The American, is going to endorse Carnahan rather than him. If anyone ever compiles a video dictionary, they can use this footage to illustrate the meaning of the phrase “his face fell.” The oddest moment in the film shows a weepy Smith saying goodbye to a remarkably dry-eyed group of campaign volunteers on the morning after the election.
So can Mr. Smith—the citizen idealist—“get to Washington anymore”? Perhaps he can if he does what a postscript to the film tells us Smith is doing this year—namely, running for the state senate before mounting any further campaigns for Congress. A whole body of research on Congressional elections by political scientists demonstrates that most voters regard paying one’s dues in local government as a minimum credential for election to Congress.
The real mistake for audiences would be to presume that the experience of the original Mr. Smith—the Frank Capra character played by James Stewart in the 1939 movie—in any way represents a golden age of citizen politics. Stewart’s Smith, after all, got to Hollywood’s version of the Senate by appointment, not election, courtesy of cigar-smoking political bosses who chose him because they thought he would be easy to manipulate. The "Anymore" in the title of Popper’s documentary represents little more than nostalgia for good old days that never were.
Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and a former editor of Washington Monthly.
