At first it seemed laughable: an actor who played Dick Tracy now posing as the James Madison of Mulholland Drive. But Beatty is a serious man, a lifelong liberal and campaign kibitzer. He knows that fame is the iron ore of the age of celebrity. Once you had to win a war–say the Civil War or World War II–to be famous in a politically potent way. Jesse Ventura proved that you just have to be famous.
To advise Beatty on using what he calls his “gift of fame,” there is an eclectic cabinet of obstreperous sorts who think outside the usual political boxes. They include Bob Borosage and Steve Cobble, veterans of Jesse Jackson’s campaigns; former senator Gary Hart and two former Hart advisers, Pat Caddell and William Bradley; columnist Arianna Huffington and campaign-finance reformer Ellen Miller. Beatty met last week, NEWSWEEK learned, with Bill Hillsman, the Minnesota media guru who engineered campaigns of Sen. Paul Wellstone–and Governor Ventura.
If Beatty does run, friends say, he might do so in stages: first entering the Democratic race, then switching to the Reform Party. Beatty thinks neither Al Gore nor Bill Bradley speaks to the Democrats’ liberal wing, but early polls give him little room. “The left is pretty comfortable” with the present candidates, says a top Democratic strategist in California. The Reform Party may be a better target. Ross Perot and Ventura are competing for control. Perot may want to lure Pat Buchanan out of the GOP to talk up an anti-free-trade platform. Ventura distrusts Buchanan’s social conservatism, but doesn’t want to run until 2004. He needs a stand-in now–one who can get enough votes to ensure federal funding for the Reform Party. Enter Beatty, a long shot from stage left? It seems unlikely, but he’s worked on stranger sets, on stranger locations.
