BEVERLY HILLS (By Matt Bai, NYTimes Magazine) November 13, 2005 — Last August, in Beverly Hills, I stopped in to see the actor, director and producer Rob Reiner, who has emerged in recent years as a highly articulate spokesman for Democratic causes and an acid critic of the president and his war in Iraq. There was a time, decades ago, when studio executives were the main political players in Hollywood, and like the heads of other profitable American industries, they spent their capital on their own parochial interests, things like intellectual property rights and access to foreign markets. Hollywood was as political as any other company town, but it was the bosses, and not the movie stars, who did the lobbying. Ronald Reagan helped change that tradition when he entered politics in the 1960's, opening the forbidden portal between two disconnected worlds, and by the time Bill Clinton occupied the White House in the 1990's, it was not unusual for Michael Douglas or Warren Beatty to turn up at a formal Washington dinner, or for Barbra Streisand to send a policy memo to a Congressional leader. The edict that Sam Goldwyn is said to have issued to filmmakers - "If you want to send a message, try Western Union" - has never seemed more passé. Both on-screen and off, famous and wealthy activists like Reiner now regard themselves not just as messengers but also as their own kind of opposition party, an essential bulwark against a president who would transform America into a ruthless global aggressor.

I sat with Reiner, who is often mentioned as a California gubernatorial candidate, and his political consultant, Chad Griffin, in an office lined with posters from Reiner's movies: "When Harry Met Sally," "This Is Spinal Tap," "A Few Good Men." "To send people off to die for a lie - I swear I never thought I'd see that again in my lifetime," Reiner told me. "We went through it in Vietnam. To me, it's the most unconscionable thing you can do. It's beyond impeachable. If we had just one house of Congress, this man would be impeached." By "we," he meant the Democratic Party.

Reiner talked authoritatively about weapons inspectors and the National Intelligence Estimate, and he made reference, with evident satisfaction, to a poll showing that just 38 percent of the public thought the country was now headed in the right direction. The decibel level of his voice began to rise in anger, as if it were not I sitting across from Reiner on his couch but the president himself. "To me, the death of people at somebody's hands over the stupidity of this man is astounding!" he shouted at me. "When I hear that on the weekend of the Super Bowl an Iraqi expatriate was explaining to him the difference between Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites, it makes me want to cry. I want to cry!" (Reiner said he recalled hearing this anecdote on cable news or talk radio, though I wasn't able to find any reference to it subsequently.) "How do you send people into a region, the most powerful superpower in the world, when you have no idea what's going on there? I'm not an Arab expert. Fine. So read a book! Sit down and learn something!" At this, Reiner leaned forward and emphasized each word with a nod of his sizable head: "Read! A! Book!"

Reiner is, to his Republican critics, a symbol of Hollywood as a haven for the ludicrous and the smug, the last impenetrable bastion - along with Cambridge, Mass., perhaps - of elitist, 20th-century liberalism. This theme has such resonance that President Bush himself picked up on it during his convention speech last year; he mockingly derided (and misquoted) his opponent as having called Hollywood "the heart and soul of America." It's not the Pollyannaish politics of the Barbra Streisand of the world that critics find so offensive; it's more the way they hold their convictions. They sometimes give the impression that they would run the country themselves, and far better, if only this business of making movies weren't so time-consuming. (Meanwhile, one of the town's few conservative icons, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is finding out that governing California is a lot harder than it looked on "Benson.") That Hollywood is in fact something less than a model of political sophistication was made clear to me a few years ago, at a party where Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry's fame, illustrated the inequities of the federal budget for a group of admirers by stacking up Oreo cookies on a grand piano. The guests reacted as if they were witnessing a scholar on the order of Noam Chomsky.

As Reiner's monologue made clear, these last few months have given Hollywood's much-maligned activists some reason to gloat. The intractable violence in Baghdad and the surrounding countryside, along with an American death toll that has now passed 2,000, affords them, at long last, some measure of vindication. On Iraq, at least, Hollywood's self-righteous skepticism appears now not only to have been justified but also to have been precisely what Bush said it wasn't: a leading indicator of mainstream American opinion. According to a poll by The Washington Post and ABC News released earlier this month, nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of the war, and 60 percent now think the United States was wrong to invade Iraq. Almost three-quarters of the respondents called the level of casualties in Iraq unacceptable.

Before we give too much credit to the rich and beautiful, it's worth noting that Hollywood stars didn't exactly take to the streets in rebellion after the invasion of Iraq; their condemnation, in most cases, followed more vocal constituencies like MoveOn.org. It's also true, as one Democratic pollster put it in a conversation recently, that even a blind dog finds a bone now and then. In other words, artists tend to be reflexively pacifist, and one of these days it was just bound to make them look prescient. Another critic is Pat Caddell, the iconoclastic political commentator, who actually lives in the Hollywood Hills. "Hollywood being against the war is a pathology," he told me recently. "They're against the war because it's good for going to cocktail parties." For older activists like Reiner, the war returned them to a familiar landscape of moral clarity. To be a loyal Democrat in the Clinton years, liberals so often had to moderate and co-opt; the invasion of Iraq evoked a more glamorous and oppositional time in Democratic politics.

And yet it's also true that Hollywood quickly grasped realities about the war that Washington, for all its gravity and accumulated sagacity, did not. From the moment the administration began making its case for invasion in the summer of 2002, most partisans and journalists in Washington found it almost inconceivable, even during the period before a fiercely contested midterm election, that the intelligence used to justify the war might simply be invented. This explains, in large part, why a lot of Congressional Democrats with years of foreign policy experience supported the invasion. To them, the notion that an American secretary of state - let alone the venerable Colin Powell - would come before the United Nations Security Council and level fabricated charges, even unwittingly, seemed incredible and even paranoid.

To Hollywood, however, such a story not only seemed credible but also entirely likely. These are people, after all, who flourish in a world of make-believe, who understand the raw persuasive power of narrative arc, moral dilemma and dramatic revelation. They were willing to accept - in fact, they recognized almost viscerally - that the president's story about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction was too richly timed and too tightly wrapped, and they understood that once a storyteller began to tinker with facts, there was no end to the scenarios he might invent that he might dubiously claim to be "based on a true story." Hollywood was so out of touch with what seemed like reality that it was, in fact, entirely in touch with the new political ethos of Washington, where facts are elasticized in pursuit of box-office approbation.

It isn't just the deterioration of support for the war, of course, that has emboldened Hollywood's political players. The indictments of Tom DeLay and I. Lewis Libby Jr., Republicans' anxiety over the coming midterm elections and the ungraceful way in which Bush's legislative agenda has lurched and stalled in Congress - all of these things seem recently to have stripped the shine from the conservative restoration in Washington. Hollywood denizens have drawn a lesson from the shifting poll numbers, which is that Hollywood is actually closer to "the heart and soul of America" than most Washington Democrats realize. Their conclusion, echoed by a new wave of progressive bloggers and contributors around the country, is that establishment Democrats mistakenly assume that the nation's voters are fundamentally conservative, when, in fact, the voters agree with liberals on most issues. The reason that Democrats lose elections, according to this theory, is that they refuse to stand up and make an unabashed case for what they believe, preferring to pander to so-called centrist voters. What people prize most is a party that will stay true to its core convictions, regardless of ideology, which is why they vote for the Republican right.

There's an amusing twist in all of this: Hollywood, which has never seen a mindless sequel it won't make for money and which crowbars BMW's and Diet Coke cans into its films in exchange for cash, is lecturing Washington on the virtue of integrity. Nevertheless, as Reiner explained it to me in his office, a lot of activists remain furious that John Kerry and other Democrats, under pressure from consultants and polls, voted for a war resolution that the party's base opposed. Reiner compared the senators' responsibilities with his own. "When I make a movie, there's all this stuff you have to deal with - egos, studios, everyone," Reiner told me. When a studio honcho asks you to compromise on a decision, he said, "you have to ask yourself: is what I'm doing cutting into a vital organ? And if it's cutting into a vital organ, you just don't do it! You don't do it. Because you have to stand up for what you believe! People love that!"

The problem with this theory is that nothing in the political history of the country suggests that a party that sounds like Hollywood can achieve anything close to a governing majority, no matter how much genuine conviction it musters. True, Democrats controlled Congress firmly and consistently enough to enact the New Deal and the Great Society, but these were not the achievements of an unabashedly liberal party. According to Mark Gersh, who is the party's foremost demographics expert, Democratic Congressional victories in the 20th century would not have been possible without the support of a third of the country's conservative voters. And the group Third Way, which promotes a centrist agenda for the party, has assembled data showing that even in 1964, arguably the zenith of Democratic rule, the party was strongly reliant on the segregationist South to maintain its majorities in the House and Senate. The historical evidence would indicate that the only way for liberals to govern America is to do precisely what Hollywood actors and other activists have come to detest - that is, to compromise.

In any event, even if many ardent Democrats would prefer a more confrontational, less accommodationist party, Hollywood by itself probably lacks the muscle to make it so. Back in the Democratic heyday of the 1960's and 70's, when studio executives held sway in Hollywood, men like Lew Wasserman, the legendary president of MCA, or Jack Valenti, the former chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, could pick up the phone and raise $50,000 on a lunch break, which made them extraordinarily powerful men in Washington. But then, like so much else in American business, the studios were sold to multinational companies like Sony and Vivendi. There are still a handful of studio bosses who relish political power, but for the most part, the new corporate studios are reluctant to involve themselves in political agendas.

Modern celebrities can command a two-minute segment on "Access Hollywood," but by and large, they are not the political contributors or fund-raisers that the old industry giants were. And, in fact, while Robert Redford will always get his calls returned, politicians seem more inclined than ever to patronize movie stars and their devotion to odd causes with empty gestures, in the same way that Richard Nixon once glad-handed Elvis Presley while resisting Presley's entreaties to deputize him as an undercover F.B.I. agent. How else to explain the fact that, even as Hollywood seethed over the president's war plans in 2002, so many Democrats in Washington - including Howard Berman and Henry Waxman, two liberal congressmen who represent celebrity-rich neighborhoods like Santa Monica, the Hollywood Hills and Bel Air - voted for the war resolution? Like other constituencies that once ruled Democratic politics (Big Labor, for instance, or urban machines) but are now finding themselves displaced, to some extent, by financiers and online activists, the people who make movies aren't writing the Democratic script anymore. What they've got left is mostly special effects.

Matt Bai, who covers national politics for the magazine, is working on a book about the Democratic Party.