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Sinise in 012?
It was an exaggerated news story for about 24 hours, but because it snowballed on mainstream American cable, it cannot be ignored that a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble, Gary Sinise, has been publicly discussed by adult professionals as a potential presidential contender for the GOP's 2012 ballot.
Sinise has been a more conscientious Hollywood participant than Reagan ever was, he's more connected to the U.S. military than Rudolph Giuliani or Mitt Romney could ever hope to be, and the theater company he co-founded in the 1970s produced just as many influential American women artists as it did men, a gender balance to which the GOP can't realistically lay claim. But before it's made clear why courting Sinise would still be a fool's errand for the Republican Party, we must first consider how the possibility ever made it into national conversation to begin with.
May 10 on the gossipy commentary Web site The Daily Beast, former McCain staffer Nicolle Wallace wrote a column titled "Waiting for Reagan," asking a fairly standard open question about where heroism lies in with her party's leadership; she had the good manners to pontificate on heroism rather than get down on her knees and plead for it. Though her reference to Sinise as a potential contender is only a paragraph long, wholly unofficial (her source is "one Republican I know" who "suggested that actor Gary Sinise might be our savior") and followed by Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno—both of whom she points out are not even considering running—her suggestion still made headlines.
The next morning CNN, which has never met a celebrity it wasn't interested in prioritizing over the actual news, grabbed the item—which was, to repeat, an unsourced suggestion mentioned in the second page of a wistful wish-list political column—ran the highly clickable headline "Actor Gary Sinise floated as possible GOP savior." By that night, even intelligent commentators Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox were bantering about it on CNBC.
Wallace isn't totally off base by name-dropping Sinise in a column that asks "Reagan, Where Art Thou?" Like Reagan, whose political career was jump-started when the contract player became president of the Screen Actors Guild, Sinise's early work at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, which he co-founded after college with actors Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry, gave him organizational and diplomatic skills that trained him for a certain kind of public life.
Although the early days of Steppenwolf are fabled for passionate, sometimes-chair-throwing squabbling both on and off stage, and although Sinise's hothead behavior on many occasions got him shut out of the group's decision-making, his instinctual belief that a small Chicago start-up theater company should have its work seen nationally turned out to be correct. Sinise is credited with aggressively driving the group's plays into the New York theater mainstream.
The artists whose careers can be traced back to Sinise's national push for the nonprofit Steppenwolf—John Malkovich, Joan Allen, John Mahoney, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Amy Morton—have made significant enough contributions to American life that the man who kicked down the door for them could easily be seen as a leader or, worst case scenario, as a legitimate community organizer.
Years ago, when Time Out ran a cover story on Steppenwolf's 30th anniversary that celebrated the company's women, all of the original members we spoke with emphasized that despite the 1970s Chicago theater aesthetic of macho, torn-T-shirt theater, Steppenwolf was a highly democratic ensemble internally. All of them also mentioned Sinise in particular as a leader who encouraged the women to take the reins, and noted that for his first gig as a director, he deliberately chose an all-female play, Waiting for the Parade, to showcase his female friends in the company.
I frankly admire Sinise's conservatism, in part because he's modest in his public posture, but far from closeted. He openly narrated a tribute to Navy Seal and Medal of Honor Michael A. Monsoor (who was killed by an insurgent's grenade in Iraq in 2006) at the same 2008 GOP convention that unleashed Sarah Palin on the world. His participation might have been jarring to a liberal fan base, but it's perfectly aligned with the kind of veteran's advocacy and military awareness that has long been part of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. (Countless works assessing American military involvement abroad have been produced there, and special performances for veterans are a regular event for almost every play the company produces.)
And, with respect to the film careers of Republican leaders Reagan and Schwarzenegger, Sinise can point to many moments in his career that could only happen to a professional artist. Actors need not be liberal to do their jobs correctly, but they need to be empathic and open-minded enough to inhabit the worlds of other people. They also need sound judgment to avoid looking like fools.
Specializing in working-class antiheroes, Sinise has played Tom Joad and Randle P. McMurphy on Broadway. He's professionally interpreted plays by Pinter and Tennessee Williams. In film and television, he's been dependably employed to create characters in all walks of life with variety and nuance. All while not every film has been a gem, there's neither a Bedtime for Bonzo nor a Jingle All the Way on his resume. As we learned so painfully from our last President, intelligent career management prior to seeking office shouldn't be overlooked.
To be clear, for all these reasons and more I hope Gary Sinise doesn't run for President. The current GOP leadership, which in my experience has very little understanding of people in the arts, would learn the hard way that the campaign process could cast Sinise in a harsh light. If the party that tried to blow the whistle on Bill Clinton's collegiate smoking habit and extra-marital activity wants a candidate with a squeaky clean past, it shouldn't go fishing in the waters of '70s Chicago theater veterans.
Also, I would hate to see Martha Lavey, Steppenwolf's politically outspoken artistic director, forced to run the theater company from a secure underground bunker, which is where she'd surely have to retreat if one of her artists became George W. Bush's Republican successor.
But if Sinise were to become an intelligent centrist voice on behalf of his party simply via his public activism; if he were to funnel his professional creative passion into raising the level of public debate that's been pinned down as Rush Limbaugh's hostage; or if, dare we even imagine it, the live arts had a vital, accomplished advocate on the right side of the aisle, one who could convince his party of the importance of grassroots American arts scenes like the one from which he emerged, a newer, more conservative Sinise wouldn't be unwelcome.
Plus, as a Steppenwolf fan who was barely in preschool by the time the famous chair-throwing days were over, I secretly want nothing more than for the old gang to start tossing furniture at each other again. Something tells me an outspoken Republican in the mix might do the trick.
