“MEN GO TO BED WITH GILDA,” Rita Hayworth used to lament about her unhappy love life. “They wake up with me.”
Gilda had been the role in a film of the same name that made Hayworth a Hollywood cultural icon. But that image was a far cry from her real self, the legendary actress said, and the disillusion often led to disappointment.
But then, illusion has always been a powerfully seductive aphrodisiac, not only sexually but also politically, as we all usually find out, though too late.
In 2008, America went to bed with the hope and change promises of Barack Obama, and four years later the infatuation remains so strong that polls show the country will likely ignore waking up every day to the worst economic crisis since the Depression and the nation more bitterly divided than at any time since the Civil War.
On Thursday, Obama heard loudly about what a disappointment he has been to Hispanics when Univision anchor Jorge Ramos insistently hammered the President about his failure to keep his promise of getting comprehensive immigration reform in the first two years of his administration when he had a Democratic House and Senate.
“I want you to acknowledge that you did not keep your promise,” Ramos said to him Spanish language Univision presidential forum live-streamed and broadcast nationally in Spanish and in English on Facebook.
Confronted like that, almost at the start of an hour-long historic event for Latino voters in the U.S., what was our political Gilda to say?
His defense was that the promise to Hispanics had been forced to take a back seat to the plummeting economy and Obama seemingly so one-minded as to feel he could not champion two causes at the same time.
Fighting to stave off another Great Depression was his reason, which is a great answer if you don’t consider that what the country got instead was an Obama Depression, and now a lot of nice sounding blame-it-on-the-economy excuses like:
“Even in that first year, one of my first acts was to invite every member of Congress who (supports)… comprehensive immigration reform to the White House and say, we need to get this done… What I confess I did not expect… is that Republicans who had previously supported comprehensive immigration reform… suddenly would walk away. That’s what I did not anticipate.”
To which Jorge, who sounded like the second coming of French Revolution crusading journalist Jean Paul Marat’s “I am the rage of people,” didn’t let up.
“You promised that,” he confronted the president again. “A promise is a promise. With all due respect you didn’t keep that promise.”
You have to admire Jorge, especially when you consider that some might wonder if he’ll still have a job tomorrow morning or perhaps find himself in Mexico covering the drug cartels.
His ultimate boss is Univision chairman Haim Saban, the billionaire Democratic donor whose wife Cheryl only yesterday was named the American representative to the United Nations by President Obama. How cozy can you get, some might say.
Only in American politics can you get an Egyptian born Israeli-American television and media magnate, best known in pop culture for giving us “The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” children’s series, who is now head honcho of possibly the only network with an anchor with enough cojones to tell the president that he’s been an utter failure on the issue dearest to the heart of many Latinos.
That kind of chutzpah must make Jorge Ramos the Hispanic Power Ranger, huh?
It has taken until 47 days before the election for someone in the mainstream news media – and Univision with Hispanic Power Ranger Ramos and partner Maria Elena Salinas certainly belong there with any of the networks hosting the debates – to publicly but respectfully before a national audience pull back the curtain on our Gilda, our wizard, and say, “Hey, you weren’t who we thought you were,” while Obama seemed to say “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
This was the best political show since Clint Eastwood and his empty chair showed us what a movie star’s brain looks like in old age.
Of course, immigration obviously is not the only issue in the election, nor the biggest facing the country, but it is immigration that perhaps has provided the window to see how the hypnotic politics of charisma can sometimes lead an enchanting politician to make promises he likely had no intention of keeping and thinking there will be no one authoritative enough or un-cowardly lion enough go call him on it.
Unfortunately, none of this will likely change the election one way or the other. Obama may be some powerless wizard – he told Ramos and Salinas he was not “all-powerful president,” after all – but Mitt Romney has probably painted himself as the Wicked Witch of the West in the eyes of too many voters, Latinos included.
So America is stuck with whichever of the mixed metaphors it chooses: The unpowerfully powerful “I don’t know how it works” wizard or the alluring sexy pin-up Gilda.
Rita Hayworth herself may have offered the best advice of how to look at people like her alter ego.
“I never really thought of myself as a sex goddess,” she said. “I felt I was more a comedian who could dance.”