I couldn’t believe how pitiful it was. Bo Derek honored to be reading scripted comments at the Republican convention, and tongue tripping over some token Spanish. And, no less pitiful, this National Review columnist complaining that the celebrity decks are stacked so far to the left that poor old Bo just won’t be enough to sway the tide:

Sadly, this isn’t going to be enough, and even more sadly, this matters. In

our tranquil, ill-educated times, showbiz sets not only the cultural, but the

political agenda. The drip, drip, drip of a predominantly liberal message

in the movies, TV, and the other entertainment media is bound to wear

through to the ballot box. We saw this in Britain, where a hostile cultural

scene proved to be the harbinger of the crushing Conservative defeat in

the 1997 election. Writing in the London Sunday Times the following

year, the newspaper’s then-resident leftist, the writer Robert Harris, noted

— with, probably, some satisfaction — that he couldn’t think of one

single “important” British writer or, for that matter, a film director, theater

director, composer (“apart from Lord Lloyd Webber”), actor, or painter

who was a Conservative.

As Mr. Harris went on to point out, “the entertainment and fashion

industries are now two of the biggest economic sectors in the world.

Never have we lived in a time more conscious of style, and never in

democratic history has it been less stylish to be on the right.”

Now, he was writing in a British context, but, like it or not, it’s not too

difficult to see the same process gathering pace over here. It’s not going

to be easy to reverse. On this battlefield, the Right are simply too few.