"In the voting booth, no one can hear you scream"

In this particular instance, it may have been televised, but it wasn't really part of the revolution. The revolution I'm talking about here is the Republican Revolution of 1994. In that year, there were 35 races for the US Senate. In eight of them, a seat held by the Democrats was lost to a Republican. In Virginia, however, the Democrats held serve when incumbent Chuck Robb defeated Oliver North. The fascinating documentary A Perfect Candidate chronicles this race.

Co-directed by a producer of The War Room, A Perfect Candidate centers mainly on Mark Goodin, North's campaign manager seeking a return promince after, and also on Don Baker, the disillusioned reporter from Washington Post covering campaign.

Is it that he is facing a man who testified under oath that he did lie to Congress (and now says that he didn't) that Chuch Robb feels that he has the safety to say in the televised debate "I would take food from the mouths of widows and orphans if we had to, to begin to solve this deficit problem"? Or is it that Robb has no clue how to be a candidate? Later on the desk of a North staffer, we see a "Widows and Orphans for North" bumber sticker. And yet Robb won. Robb while he was governor went to parties with lots of coccaine during his affair with a Playboy bunny, cheating on his wife who is the daughter of Lyndon Johnson--their wedding was in the White House. And yet Robb won. He clumsly went out of his way to clarify that he had no stance on issues in a race against a very charasmatic figure on the side that swept the Congressional races all over the country. And yet Robb still won. What does this say? "Who are you going to vote for, the flu or the mumps?" one astute voter says.

The commentary track by co-directors R.J. Cutler and David Van Taylor is very good too about process of making a documentary like this.