The Sitter & Political Prognostications

I made the sorry mistake of taking our Arizona Republic movie reviewer at his word. I should know better. Bill Goodykoontz gave The Sitter a three-and-a-half star review and I bought it. He said, “The Sitter isn't Hill's best movie, not by a long shot (it is, in fact, a sort of lesser, comic version of "Cyrus," in which he plays a more seriously tormented young man living with his mother). But it's one worth watching, something that can be said of most of his films without hesitation.” I sat in the theater with about sixty other people. For the entire movie there wasn’t a single sound—no snicker, no chuckle, no guffaw. Just silence. I was surprised that no one walked out, surprised I didn’t. It was a silly, nonsensically plotted, unfunny, unnecessarily raunchy film. Jonah Hill should stick to his new slimmer figure and agree to more roles like the one he had in Money Ball. I’d like him a lot better. One reviewer at Rotten Tomatoes said it better: “There is no doubt an audience for this material among adolescent boys, but for almost everyone else, this is 82 deja vu minutes of your life you're not getting back.”

I’m no political pundit, but with the coming battle for the Republican nomination, I think I can make a reasonable prediction. If either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich becomes the nominee, he will probably beat Barack Obama, all based on a negative vote over seeming deficiencies in the present administration. Thus, Obama will become a one-term president, the first since George H. W. Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton in 1992. But I think it likely that whichever Republican wins the nomination and then the presidency in 2012, he will also be a one-termer. Our nation’s economy is in such a mess right now that no one will be able to do much more than Obama’s done. And so in 2016 we’ll have more disgruntled voters dumping Romney/Gingrich to go to another Democrat. Some have speculated that Hillary Clinton might challenge Obama for the nomination in 2012, but I don’t think that’s very likely. However, she would certainly be the logical choice in 2016, and she could certainly beat either Romney or Gingrich after they too have fallen on their faces. And she’d be only 68. There you have it. Unless the jobless rate drops to 8% by election time, a Republican will be our next president. But he will last for only one term. Then we’ll see how our first female president can do it.