I saw a funny (and disturbing) movie last week, “Our Brand is Crisis”, a documentary that follows some people from James Carville’s political consulting firm as they advise a candidate in the 2002 presidential election campaign in Bolivia. The main consultant was a 40ish guy named Jeremy Rosner, who looked a lot like Ben Stiller and whos motto was “progressive politics and foreign policy for profit.” (The Bolivian presidential candidate, “Goni,” looked a bit like Bill Clinton.) The movie showed lots of strategy sessions (complete with ugly 3-d bar graphs) and focus groups (who sat around talking and eating potato chips; it was pretty funny). I was actually wondering how a Bolivian candidate could afford such expensive political consultants, but I suppose most of the cost was local labor (running the focus groups, polling, etc.) which must be pretty cheap.

I perhaps should be embarrassed to admit that I knew nothing about Bolivia before seeing the movie and thus was in suspense throughout. They said at some point in the movie that there were 11 candidates running, and I would have liked a little more background on the other 10 candidates to get a sense of where they stood and who was supporting them. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say that the election itself was very close.

I was amazed at how much the consultants allowed Rachel Boynton (the director, no known relation to Sandra) to film all their private meetings. Some of the things they said were pretty embarrassing, I’d think–like the bit where they plan attack ads. But I guess it’s all advertising for their firm.

There was a hilarious cameo by the U.S. Ambassador (“California will only buy your natural gas if Bolivia is not involved in cocaine”).

At the end, there was a disturbing exchange where Boynton asks Rosner how he felt about what’s been happening in Bolivia and he made some comment about the difficulty of establishing a “commitment to democracy” in poor countries. It was sort of weird because I didn’t see any evidence that the Bolivians didn’t want democracy, even if they were dissatisfied with particular political leaders.

Finally, one of the underlying concerns of everyone was Bolivia’s economy, its budget crunch, and unemployment. “Jobs” was a key issue, and a lot of people felt that jobs were being sent overseas. The funny thing is, in the U.S. we wouldn’t be so happy if we felt our jobs were being sent to Bolivia. So I wasn’t quite sure how to think about this issue (international economics not being my area of expertise, to say the least).

Anyway, the movie was entertaining and thought-provoking, and I highly recommend it, expecially for anyone interested in polling and elections. For those of you in NYC, it’ll be at the Film Forum starting Mar 1.