By Steve Polston

June 27, 2019

EXCERPT — page 1: “

Final paper – When Ronald Reagan brought Hollywood, California politics to America

Steve Polston

FMS 522 Los Angeles: Movies & Culture

June 27, 2019

Professor Katie Brown

            The millennial Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg is mayor (January 2012 to present) of a venerable midwestern industrial city, South Bend, Ind., where the auto industry died more than fifty years ago. The city comprises multiple economic and ethnic communities that still self-identify as based in the auto industry and unions, as well as redlining in housing policy for African Americans. He quite easily brings to mind in this now-revived city the actor Ronald Reagan, who appeared in another South Bend story, the film Knute Rockne, All American (1940, George Bacon, William K. Howard). Reagan played a seriously ill student athlete on the Notre Dame football team in South Bend, “George Gipp,” who famously tells his teammates to win one for “the Gipper.” That line became as much a signature for the young Hollywood actor as anything he did as President of the United States forty years later. Reagan symbolized to an audience seeking escapism during World War II the optimistic can-do Americanism that each person ought to embody, a resiliency based on always seeking to win. American movie-goers rewarded Reagan with an audience in films, in politics and in his life for seven decades. Now Buttigieg has a national audience, but as his term as mayor wears on he is being challenged by the audience at home. Will he continue to net an electoral audience for his can-do optimism in an age where the current President of the United States governs and campaigns on a recumbency that seeks to recall “again-ism” as the better day, the better America? Last night half of the Democratic party hopefuls debated each other in Miami, Fla. on NBC News. Tonight, Buttigieg will be among the crowded two-night debating candidates.            Since Buttigieg has ventured to L.A. once for a fundraiser and canceled another due to a ” https://stevepolston.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Final-paper.docx