The Lady of 10,000 Lakes

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the moment I knew I would never vote for Amy Klobuchar for president. To mark the occasion, I am—for the first time—entertaining the possibility that I should reconsider.

It was, indeed, late February 2019 when the New York Times published a story, “How Amy Klobuchar Treats Her Staff,” that featured an alarming number of horror stories by former minions of the senior senator from Minnesota—some named, some unnamed—portraying her as something of a petty tyrant in her Senate office, complete with a hot temper and a tendency to embarrass and demean those whom she feels are not living up to her harsh, exacting standards.

While the most memorable and amusing nugget from that article involved Klobuchar ordering an assistant to wash her comb after she used it to eat a salad on an airplane (the assistant had apparently misplaced the fork), the truly disturbing details concerned Klobuchar’s penchant for hurling office supplies in the general direction of aides who had pissed her off, as well as her obsessive preoccupation with her public image, for which she seemed to take little personal responsibility (“We are becoming a joke!”).

Whether these anecdotes are representative or exaggerated—the Times reporting included a fair share of compliments and warm memories as well—Klobuchar has, in fact, presided over one of the highest staff turnover rates in the Senate throughout her dozen-plus-year tenure. By definition, she is firing or otherwise driving out employees at a record clip relative to her colleagues, and it would be downright negligent for voters not to take this into account when ascertaining whether she is a proper fit for the highest office in the land.

When these whisperings first came to light—and the pundit pontificating that naturally followed—many questioned whether Klobuchar was the victim of a sexist double standard. That is, whether a male politician with a comparable personnel record would be treated more forgivingly, as though treating one’s employees like crap is attractive in a man but unseemly in a woman.

Personally, I find abuse of one’s subordinates repulsive in any context—particularly by someone running for president—and I fully subscribe to the behavioral rule of thumb that, as Dave Barry put it, “If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person.”

Hence my previous skepticism toward Klobuchar, an outwardly genial and nonthreatening figure—her 2015 memoir is titled “The Senator Next Door”—whose affable exterior apparently conceals much rougher edges that only surface offstage and after hours.

Why, then, am I now mulling the prospect (however remote) of voting for her anyway? Why, for that matter, did the good people of New Hampshire rank her their third-favorite candidate in last week’s primary, well ahead of so-called frontrunners Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden?

Partly, I suspect, it’s due to Klobuchar’s sheer doggedness in the face of long odds. Among other things, her ability to stick to her centrist talking points through thick and thin; to repeat her cheesy mom jokes endlessly and without embarrassment; to cut her opponents down to size without resorting to rudeness or infantility.

Her secret sauce, in short, is to be the very embodiment of friendly midwestern passive-aggressiveness coupled with steely D.C. competence and resolve. As a third-term senator, she has earned her reputation as an old-fashioned senatorial workhorse and dealmaker whom one underestimates at one’s peril. If these achievements have sometimes come at the expense of overworked underlings—well, you know what they say about making an omelet.

In truth, the list of exceptional leaders who have also been extremely unpleasant bosses is longer than we might care to admit, and that correlation is not always accidental. As seen in “The Devil Wears Prada” or “Whiplash”—not to mention in virtually every college football coach in the history of sport—sometimes driving one’s charges to physical and/or mental extremes is the way to bring out the best in them and generate excellence for the whole team. If tough love is purposeful and strategic, the payoff can be revelatory.

Of course, for every Miranda Priestly there is a Selina Meyer, and commentators weren’t wrong in having a little “Veep” déjà vu upon reading that Klobuchar once quipped to an aide, “I would trade three of you for a bottle of water.” There is no contradiction in being both an effective lawmaker and a poor manager of people, and it’s possible Klobuchar’s compassion and empathy—such as they are—simply don’t extend inside her own office.

That said, in a universe where the sitting commander-in-chief is both an inept lawmaker and so emotionally insecure as to fire Cabinet-level officials via tweet, even the worst possible version of Amy Klobuchar would seem to be a more-than-acceptable risk for the republic to take on November 3, particularly in light of her many obvious strengths.

More than anything, Klobuchar’s appeal lies in her personal and ideological inoffensiveness—her Goldilocks-like lack of polarities—which, while not particularly inspiring, seems tailor-made to put the maximal number of voters at ease in an age of never-ending hysteria and existential dread.

The Klobuchar proposition, then, is a variation of what her fellow senator (and former fellow candidate) Michael Bennet once tweeted about himself: “If you elect me president, I promise you won’t have to think about me for two weeks at a time. I’ll do my job […] so you can go raise your kids and live your lives.”

For a solid chunk of the American public, I imagine that sounds like a pretty good deal.

Big Ten

If alphabetical order, here are ten of my favorite movies of 2018:

BLACKKKLANSMAN

Spike Lee’s wildly (and disturbingly) entertaining portrayal of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who, with the help of a Jewish colleague, infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and lived to tell the tale.  What Stallworth found, it turned out, was a gang of rowdy, bloodthirsty dimwits who could be fooled into believing anything so long as it was preceded by refrains like “White power!” or “America first!”  Any resemblance to current events is purely non-coincidental.

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

By now, it should not be breaking news that Melissa McCarthy is a first-rate actress.  (That Sean Spicer imitation didn’t happen by accident.)  However, in case there was any residual doubt that McCarthy can do pretty much anything, as Exhibit A I offer her work here, playing a New York alcoholic who commits widespread literary fraud in order to pay her rent and feed her cat, eventually drawing the attention of the FBI.  I’d hasten to add that it’s all based on a true story, but if you know anything at all about New Yorkers, you probably figured that out already.

THE DEATH OF STALIN

If you’ve ever wondered what Veep would be like if it took place inside the Soviet Union in the 1950s, wonder no more!  Directed by Armando Iannucci—yes, the very man who created the funniest show on television—this ridiculous political farce about the jockeying for power among Kremlin bureaucrats following the demise of Uncle Joe undoubtedly carries a greater ring of truth than the official record might suggest.  Accurate or not, its cast of characters provide more demented laughs than any rogues gallery this side of the Trump White House.

THE FAVOURITE

Speaking of demented, here was a similarly-pitched historical rivalry committed ever-so-exaggeratedly to celluloid.  In this case, the competition unfolds at the throne of England’s Queen Anne in the early 18^th century, and involves an All About Eve-esque usurpation of one loyal servant by another, both of whom vie for the queen’s affections with steadily-escalating, um, fervor.  The queen is played by Olivia Colman, her two suitresses by Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz.  The latter’s suggestion, “Let’s go shoot something!” is possibly the finest line reading in any movie this year.

FREE SOLO

Rarely am I driven to a movie theater by a New York Times opinion column, but after reading Bret Stephens’ beaming reaction to this documentary about 33-year-old rock climber Alex Honnold, I needed to know what all the fuss was about.  I understood quickly enough:  In 2017, after months of preparation, Honnold attempted to become the first person in history to ascend the 3,000-foot-tall face of Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope or harness—a suicide mission if ever there was one.  As Stephens wrote in his column, “In a world of B.S. artists—and in a country led by one—Honnold is modeling something else, a kind of radical truthfulness.  Either he’s going to get it exactly right, or he’s going to die.”

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

If the idea of the director of Moonlight adapting a novel by James Baldwin doesn’t get you racing to the nearest art house, I don’t know what more I can do for you.  Having made the best movie of 2016, Barry Jenkins could scarcely have chosen a richer source for a follow-up than Baldwin’s 1974 novel about love and racism in New York that, like much of Baldwin’s work, doesn’t seem to have aged a day.  That’s to say nothing of the divine lead performances by KiKi Layne and Stephan James and the gorgeous art direction, set design and musical score, the likes of which we haven’t seen since, well, Moonlight.

LEAVE NO TRACE

If a man raises his daughter right—teaching her important values, reading her fine books, feeding her healthy food—is it any business of the state that he does it in a tent in the woods somewhere in rural Oregon?  That’s the question this movie poses—in a blessedly non-political manner—and it’s to director Debra Granik’s great credit that it provides absolutely no answer.  All it offers is truth, realism and a group of people who are all doing the best they can under the circumstances.  Isn’t that what a movie is for?

ROMA

You don’t hear the word “Felliniesque” bandied about much nowadays—particularly not about a Mexican director best known for the third Harry Potter film and for launching Sandra Bullock into space.  Yet there is no more succinct way to describe Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma—a semi-autobiographical depiction of Cuarón’s childhood from the viewpoint of his nanny—than to observe how much it resembles—tonally and visually—much of the best work of Italy’s most famous auteur.  If Beale Street luxuriates in the most lavish possibilities of color film, Roma does the same for black and white.

SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE

Who would’ve guessed that Black Panther would only be 2018’s second-best comic book blockbuster with an African-American protagonist?  While I shan’t say a word against Ryan Coogler’s groundbreaking, socially-conscious cultural behemoth, this animated Spider-Man spinoff nonetheless wins the superhero sweepstakes in my mind by the sheer force of its charm, its wit and—most pleasantly surprising of all—its acute understanding of the awkwardness of being the new kid in school just as puberty is beginning to kick in.  (See Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, which just missed my list, for the female version of this.)

WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?

I’m generally skeptical about turning human beings into saints, but if Fred Rogers wasn’t a saint, I don’t know who is.  In an age when we are (justifiably) jittery about leaving small children alone with kindly-seeming men of the cloth, here was a Presbyterian minister with a children’s TV show who proved to be exactly as gentle and trustworthy as he appeared—perhaps even more so—and who, as David McCullough once argued, probably had a greater educational impact on young people than any human being in the 20^th century.

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Life Itself

I’ve seen more new movies in 2016 than during any single year of my life—and there are still 12 more days to go.  Selective consumer that I am, I have enjoyed nearly all my filmgoing experiences to date, and have had enormous difficulty cramming the best of the best into a traditional top-10 list.

As I continue reflecting on all the wonderful moments the cinema offered in an otherwise wretched year for the human race, I offer some fleeting impressions of my final four—a quartet of films that burrowed deep under my skin and never really found their way out.  Four singular conceptions that—in radically divergent form—satisfied (or nearly satisfied) Roger Ebert’s definition of a truly great film:  “It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us.  It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.”

MOONLIGHT

“You can pick from the menu.  Or I can give you the chef’s special.”  So says Kevin, the chef, to his childhood friend, Chiron.  Now in their late 20s, the two men haven’t seen each other for more than a decade.  In all probability, they would’ve remained strangers for the rest of their lives, except that Kevin recently phoned Chiron in the middle of the night to ask what he’s been doing with himself.  And now Chiron has driven 700 miles from Atlanta to Miami—materializing in Kevin’s diner, unannounced—to provide him some semblance of an answer.

Why?  Because, for all their time apart, he and Kevin share a secret that can never be reconciled until they are in the same room at the same time.  Their history—forged in one rapturous, terrifying moment many years ago—is at once totally alien to the society they inhabit, yet absolutely essential to understanding who either of them truly is.

The circumstances of their upbringing—namely, being poor and black in America—have prevented them from facing this complicated truth head-on, and so they have both chosen to suppress it—albeit in strikingly different ways.

And yet, on this night, in this diner—as Kevin prepares the chef’s special—there is suddenly the prospect of a reckoning—an echo of John Adams’s plea to Thomas Jefferson, “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other”—and with it, the possibility of love, happiness and inner peace.

O.J.: MADE IN AMERICA

In the greatest legal circus of the 1990s—The People of California v. O.J. Simpson—Mark Fuhrman was supposed to be the prosecution’s star witness.  He was the LAPD detective who found the pair of black gloves linking O.J. Simpson to the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.  One glove was recovered at Nicole’s house, the other at O.J.’s.  Both were splattered with the DNA of all three individuals, as were the driveways of both homes and the innards of O.J.’s white Ford Bronco.

In short, it was a slam dunk:  With a veritable orgy of both direct and circumstantial evidence, it was obvious to any fair-minded person that Simpson—an NFL hall of famer, actor and all-around celebrity—had committed double homicide.  Game, set, match.

And then Fuhrman took the witness stand, and everything fell apart.

To the defense team’s delight and the prosecution’s unending chagrin, Fuhrman turned out to be a scumbag:  A crooked, racist maniac with a long, proud history of brutality against LA’s black community.  Having bragged about his bigotry and deceitfulness on tape, he became Exhibit A in the defense’s theory that the O.J. evidence may have been planted—a narrative of institutional racism that jibed perfectly with the actual history of the LAPD, to say nothing of the nation as a whole, then and now.

In Ezra Edelman’s documentary, prosecutor Marcia Clark muses, “The only reason I know [Fuhrman] didn’t plant the evidence is because [he] couldn’t have.  Otherwise, I’m with them.”  Therein lies one answer to how a clearly guilty man could be acquitted by a jury of his peers:  Because after 400 years of white people in America getting away with murder, maybe it was time—if only just this once—for a black person to do the same.

ELLE

Michèle Leblanc has been having a very strange week.  Her son is moving into an apartment he can’t afford with a fiancé he doesn’t love who’s carrying a child that (probably) isn’t his.  At work, her underlings are fomenting a rebellion against her take-no-prisoners managerial style.  Elsewhere, her sort-of divorced mother is carrying on with a lover half her age, while Michèle herself is fooling around with her best friend’s husband and—for good measure—growing very flirty with her married next-door neighbor, Patrick.

Oh yeah:  And on Thursday afternoon, a mysterious man in a ski mask entered her apartment, wrestled her to the ground, savagely raped her and left.

By all outward appearances, that last item was the least-distressing moment of Michèle’s week.  Apart from a quick doctor’s visit, she doesn’t bother telling anyone about having been assaulted until dinner on Saturday evening—and even then, she hastens to add, “I feel stupid for bringing it up.”  When her flabbergasted dining companions ask why she hasn’t called the police, she shrugs, “It’s over—it doesn’t need talking about anymore.”

Is she in denial?  A closet masochist?  Just plain nuts?

As Rick Blaine would say:  It’s a combination of all three.

Played by Isabelle Huppert, Michèle is shown, in the fullness of time, to be a woman ruthlessly in pursuit of her own happiness—a process that, in her case, has a curious tendency to rob everyone else of theirs.  Like a wilier version of Selina Meyer in Veep, she is a fundamentally rotten specimen—a textbook sociopath who derives all earthly pleasure from making others squirm—yet somehow emerges as a compelling, magnetic—perhaps even heroic—femme fatale, prepared to turn any setback—up to and including sexual assault—to her advantage and assume control of her own destiny.  What a nasty woman.

KRISHA

It’s the morning of Thanksgiving.  The house is bouncing with activity, inhabited by at least half a dozen adults, another half-dozen twentysomethings, one newborn and an indeterminate number of dogs.  All is well—if a bit chaotic—and then Krisha walks in.

Who is Krisha?  In one sense, she is the person for whom the phrase, “There’s one in every family,” was coined.  She is the sole dinner guest who seems out of sync with everyone else around the table:  The one you don’t engage in direct conversation, for fear of what she might say, do or drink.  A reigning expat from the Island of Misfit Toys.

But no more:  She’s here now.  She’s sobered up (allegedly).  She wants to help out with the cooking and reacquaint herself with her kin and be an all-around better person.

And everyone present is thrilled to hear this.  They miss her, they know what an unholy wreck she had become, and they’re willing to give her every chance to earn her way back into the fold.

Except…not really.  Yeah, sure, if she’s serious about turning over a new leaf, then she has their unwavering love and support and blah blah blah.

In truth, Krisha’s family knows her better than she knows herself, and it all boils down to one unshakable fact:  There is no real hope for her in the end.  She has burned too many bridges—neglected too many responsibilities—to start over again from scratch.  Whatever forgiveness she wants for her sins—indeed, for her entire history to be cast into the sea of God’s forgetfulness—she cannot summon the strength to concede what can be neither forgotten nor forgiven.  When push comes to shove, she would just as well have another drink.

Trey Edward Shults’s film, drawn from his own life experiences, is a testament to the notion that life doesn’t always offer redemption.  It is altogether fitting that it would be based on real events and be released in 2016, since its portrait of a woman teetering on the edge of the abyss is a perfect metaphor for the blazed, desperate nation that produced her.

Continuity with Change

Out there in the über-liberal, anti-Hillary, Bernie Bro corner of the interwebs, the following challenge has been posed:

“Convince me to vote for Hillary Clinton without mentioning Donald Trump.”

As with so much else about the #NeverHillary crowd, it is unclear whether the above is a genuine, good-faith inquiry or just a snarky dig at Clinton’s supporters’ supposed moral bankruptcy.

It’s a rather bizarre question, in any case.  If it’s meant as pure rhetoric—a way of pointing out how the leading justification for Clinton’s presidency is that it would prevent a Trump presidency—then we can take the point while also acknowledging its childish assumption that competing candidates could ever be judged independently of each other—as if choosing one option didn’t also mean rejecting the other.

However, if the question is meant seriously, then it’s just a stupid question.

Can liberals identify reasons to elect Clinton that don’t involve her not being Donald Trump, you ask?  Are there really other liberals who think the answer is “no”?

There are dozens of ways to support Hillary’s candidacy without regard to her Republican opponent.  Many of them are identical to those that led millions of future Bernie Bros to support Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012—and, naturally, many of the same traits also applied to Bernie Sanders during this year’s primaries.  There are also reasons to endorse her that are sui generis, applicable to her and her alone.

Broadly speaking, Hillary is an enthusiastic subscriber to virtually the entire Democratic Party platform—thus, anyone in ideological agreement with Democratic principles is, by definition, in general alignment with Clinton on what we sometimes refer to as “the issues.”

For instance, she would clearly support and defend—and, if we’re lucky, expand and streamline—the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, overruling every last congressional attempt to kill it once and for all.

She would affirm the recently-established right of any two consenting adults to get married, have children and live happily ever after, while also ensuring those same people cannot be fired or otherwise discriminated against for unconstitutional reasons.

She would continue President Obama’s fight against global warming and his attempts to make the country more energy independent.

She would pledge solidarity with Muslims and other religious minorities against persecution by violent Christian extremists.

She would shape a Supreme Court that would vote in favor of a multitude of issues that liberals care passionately about—voting rights, women’s rights, transgender rights, you name it.

She would try to do something about gun control and—if the stars are aligned just right—maybe even succeed.

In addition to being the first female chief executive, she would appoint a record number of women to her cabinet, not to mention a boatload of ethnic and racial minorities spread throughout the executive branch, thereby inspiring countless young people to consider public service for the first time in their lives.

She would hold meetings and actually listen to what the other people have to say.

She would forge relationships with every last member of Congress, knowing that someday she might need their support for something important.

Long story short, she would essentially be a slightly more mature—but slightly less exciting—version of Barack Obama.  In effect, she would represent Obama’s third term in office, for better and for worse.  That’s the argument for electing her president.  Take it or leave it.

Now, it’s true enough that Clinton herself has never explicitly said, “Vote for me, Obama’s third term!”  However, it doesn’t require a great deal of reading between the lines to grasp the subtext of all of her major policy positions, which can be summed up as, “If you’ve enjoyed life under Obama, you’ll enjoy it under me.”

I realize this is an inherently uninspiring message—a tacit admission that things probably aren’t going to change very much over the next four-to-eight years—but it’s also admirably fresh and realistic—a means of subtly lowering our expectations to a level at which we might actually want to re-elect her four years hence.

Every president in history has needed to confront the gap between what he thinks he can accomplish and what he can actually accomplish, and Hillary Clinton stands apart from most previous candidates in her deep understanding of this fact.  Among the many differences between her and Donald Trump—a man whom, you’ll note, I haven’t mentioned in quite some time—is that Trump apparently thinks a president can do literally anything he wants, while Clinton knows full well that the job is extraordinarily limiting and depends on a great deal of teamwork to get anything meaningful accomplished.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy intoned to the American people, “Let us begin.”  When Lyndon Johnson succeeded Kennedy in November 1963—albeit under unusual circumstances—he said, “Let us continue.”  That’s the dynamic between Obama and Clinton:  They are so compatible in their basic worldview and value systems that we can expect an exceptionally smooth transition from one to the other (this time without an assassination in between).

I don’t know about you, but I have quite enjoyed the Obama administration.  It has followed through on a plethora of progressive actions that were utterly lacking under George W. Bush, and I can say unequivocally that my own personal corner of America is infinitely better off now than it was eight years ago.  If Obama were eligible to run for a third term, I would vote for him a third time.

But he can’t, so I’ll settle with Hillary, instead.

Many Republicans will be familiar with this sense of depleted enthusiasm, since they elected George H.W. Bush in 1988 by pretending he was Ronald Reagan, an incumbent who was term-limited after eight years of making many conservatives’ dreams come true.  In the end, Bush proved a capable but ultimately lackluster follow-up act, keeping some promises while breaking others, and is today admired as much by liberals as by conservatives.

History could easily be in the process of repeating itself on the other side of the ideological spectrum, and that is roughly what we should expect.  Hillary Clinton has drifted to the left on numerous issues as of late, but the intractability of Congress and Clinton’s own cautiousness will surely limit the reach of her administration’s most ambitious goals, resulting in exactly what her most clear-eyed advocates have promised:  Modest, gradual progress through compromise—a variation of Selina Meyer’s campaign slogan in Veep, “Continuity with Change.”

Sounds pretty good to me.

Life Imitates ‘Veep’

Here’s a small confession:  I didn’t watch any of the Republican National Convention last month.  For all the hysterical buildup about what was supposed to be the greatest political show on Earth, when the moment finally came, I decided I just couldn’t take four days of vulgar, hateful narcissism posing as American leadership.

So, instead, I watched all five seasons of Veep.

I know:  It was a good week for irony all around.

For reasons that escape me, I hadn’t previously indulged a single episode of HBO’s hit political sitcom.  Now that I’ve seen all of them, my only regret is that there aren’t several hundred more to tide me over until the end of the next administration.

During the Clinton and Bush eras—Bill and George W., that is—we had an exemplary TV show called The West Wing to assure us—perhaps in vain—that the men and women in the executive branch got into public service for all the right reasons and, despite their flaws, were essentially intelligent, decent people.

Now, in our own time, we have Veep—another fictionalized look at the inner workings of the federal government—which argues that the folks in the upper echelons of power are there for all the wrong reasons and are essentially rotten, vindictive pricks.

While these first five seasons have aired during Barack Obama’s presidency, Veep seems tailor-made for whatever nonsense is coming next.  Whether the 45^th president is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Veep will play like a documentary for what the most cynical Americans will assume about the shenanigans in Washington, D.C., over the next four-to-eight years.

If I weren’t such a jaded freak myself, I’d probably conclude that Veep presents an extremely dark omen for the American character and that its enormous popular and critical success is an indication of our country’s ongoing moral decline on the world stage.

However—degenerate that I am—I can only report the truth, which is that this series has made me laugh out loud more than any other TV comedy I can recall.  To borrow a line from The Producers:  It’s shocking, outrageous, insulting, and I’ve loved every minute of it.

Indeed, from a purely ethical perspective, Veep would be a total disgrace if it weren’t so goddamned funny.  Like The Producers and other, similar comedic assaults on good taste, Veep follows the George Carlin credo of identifying the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior and deliberately crossing it over and over again.

The people in this show—principally, the vice president and her staff—regularly do and say things that, in real life, would undoubtedly result in firings, lawsuits, restraining orders and the occasional stint in the big house.  The joke, then, is that everyone else behaves in exactly the same way; therefore, there is no dependable authority figure to hold anyone to account.  The inmates have very definitely assumed control of the asylum, and in this case, the asylum is the U.S. government.

This is not to say the characters in Veep are wholly immoral, incompetent, crooked or insane.  A show like that would get very old very fast, since an entirely evil person is only slightly less boring than an entirely virtuous one.

The genius of Veep—like the genius of Seinfeld—is to have it both ways:  To allow its heroes to behave horribly while subtly punishing them at key moments along the way, forcing them to haltingly, grudgingly learn their lessons.  (Not that it changes their behavior much.)

If you’re looking for a one-sentence synopsis, we might say that Veep is about a gang of selfish, foul-mouthed sociopaths with a slow-burning contempt for their jobs, themselves, the American people and each other.  Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the show’s leading lady, has described her character, Vice President Selina Meyer, as “frustrated,” and that helps explain why the show works:  Because, in our own way, we identify with that frustration and feel liberated by how these loony toons express themselves in the teeth of it.

And boy, do they ever.  While the Obama administration has maintained its “no drama” reputation behind the scenes, Veep has functioned as its histrionic evil twin.

If the show has a secret sauce, it’s the dialogue, which is at once infinitely quotable and mostly unprintable.  Even for HBO—a premium cable network that has long pushed the envelope for which words can be broadcast on American television—Veep has proved groundbreaking for its prevalence and variety of four-letter words and other adults-only verbal tics.  I once had a poster in my college dorm that listed over two thousand vulgar words and phrases compiled by George Carlin over the years, and I suspect the Veep writers have that same poster and are trying to cram in every last item before the series gets cancelled.  (It has been renewed at least through 2017, so there’s still time.)

At times, the entire show seems to be powered by pure sarcasm, with insults piled upon insults, each one more ridiculous and linguistically inventive than the last (e.g. “You know, you’re about as annoying as a condom filled with fire ants”).  And when these guys aren’t simply one-upping each other with expressions of outsized mutual loathing, they are in a state of perpetual crisis control, attempting to undo political damage they themselves caused, invariably unleashing even greater havoc in the process.  Almost every line of dialogue is pitched at a level of maximal desperation (“Burn everything incriminating, including this building”) or maximal rage (“If anyone needs me, I’ve gone outside to scream into the night”).  There’s nothing subtle about any of this, and that’s what makes it so invigorating and so addictive.  Call it a perpetual catharsis machine.

Yet the quiet moments work, too—rare as they are—thanks to good old-fashioned comic timing.  Notice, say, the chief of staff’s expression when Selina proclaims, “That’s my final solution.”  Or the speed with which Gary, Selina’s loyal bag man, can turn a smile into a frown upon realizing he has misread the mood of the room.  Or how that same bag man is gradually revealed to be the one major character with any hint of a soul, and how—for that reason—he is perhaps the most abused and underappreciated character of them all.  Typical.

All great comedy is based on exaggeration of a basic human truth.  In the world of Veep, that truth is that public service is an inherently aggravating, thankless business that does not always draw the best and the brightest to the table and that, over time, can force otherwise honorable people to behave in dishonorable ways.

Of the series’ many running gags, arguably the most resonant is the vice president’s team’s habit of instituting elaborate cover-ups whenever anything goes awry, feeding ridiculous “official” stories to the press when simply telling the truth would be far less stressful and—in many cases—less incriminating.  Indeed, the joke is that Selina’s people are equally prepared to lie about something totally benign—for instance, how Selina cut up her face by absentmindedly walking into a glass door—as about something much more sinister, such as the illegal use of Americans’ stolen personal data.

Except that it’s not a joke when it happens for real—as we are virtually assured it will under either a President Hillary or a President Donald.  If these two human specimens have nothing else in common, they share the instinct to conceal any and all information that might make them look bad—no matter how insignificant that information is, and no matter how easily they could get caught in the lie.  While Trump’s penchant for dishonesty is exponentially more disturbing than Clinton’s—indeed, he seems to have lost any capacity to discern truth from fiction—anyone who believes Hillary can be taken at face value is in for a long series of unpleasant surprises in the years to come.

The good news is that neither of these candidates is quite as appalling as their fictional counterparts in Veep—although, in the vulgarity department, at least one of them is sure giving it the old college try.

We always claim that truth is stranger than fiction.  When it comes to our leaders, I’d really prefer it were the other way around.