How do you tell a real politician from a Hollywood politician? In the movies, your man always ends up on the Straight Talk Express. 

This is the week of the Democratic convention and the start of months of concentrated politicking, an apt moment to survey campaign movies and to measure our candidates against their Hollywood counterparts. Yes, it's odd to go and rent empty speeches and bogus displays of patriotism at a time when you can get them for free on television, but the exercise is not entirely masochistic. Artists, with their fabled distaste for compromise, might have something to teach us about politicians, for whom compromise is the true art.

With few exceptions, however, the movies I screened—more than 60 hours—were bad politics and worse art. And those exceptions—The Manchurian Candidate (1962), parts of the Robert Altman/Garry Trudeau HBO series Tanner '88, and television's The WestWing—were good in proportion to how much they flouted the "party line." By that I don't mean leftist-populist, which is the genre's prevailing political thrust. (It suits me fine: Whatever keeps Michael Medved up at night is a socially constructive force.) The real party line in campaign movies turns out to lead straight to the Big Speech (let's call it the BS)—the one in which the candidate either bravely affirms principles over politics and is transfigured, or cravenly yields to expediency and is damned. Compromise, the core of the political process, is regarded not as an art but as a black art.

The transfiguring BS happens like this: The crowd is primed to cheer. The candidate (a man, generally) begins a speech that has been worked on by his handlers, the one designed to please the fat cats and ward heelers—i.e., the "special interests." But at the last second, he cannot bring himself to read what's in front of him. He eyeballs the eager crowd, then lays aside that accursed speech and begins to extemporize. I have met the devil, he says, and nearly sold my soul to get elected. This country, he goes on, deserves better. The people deserve better. The candidate's spouse, who has only recently discovered that he wasn't the Superman of integrity she thought she'd married, regards him again with Lois Lane eyes. The crowd goes wild: Balloons and confetti and soaring music signal the politician's apotheosis.

That's the climax of Running Mates, a Turner Network Television film that aired Aug. 13 and that came to my attention when the editor of Slate, Michael Kinsley, phoned to say he had a cameo. The first time I watched the movie, I missed him; the second time I looked hard and found him on a TV screen in a campaign plane. But the sound was off and no one was paying attention. So the filmmakers turned up the volume for Arianna Huffington and Robert Novak but not for Kinsley: Bye-bye to the good review in Slate. That said, Mike was lucky he was vaguely seen and not heard. Films like Running Mates load themselves up with TV pundits in the hope that recognizable talking heads will lend them a touch of authenticity. What happens is the opposite: The movies lend the pundits a touch of inauthenticity.

RunningMates Running Mates was useful, however, for its textbook BS. The movie tells the story of a Michigan governor and party nominee (Tom Selleck) who disregards the exhortations of a loose alliance of liberal females—his dishy campaign manager (Laura Linney), his dishy wife (Nancy Travis), the dishy wife (Teri Hatcher) of a Hollywood studio head, and the dishy but aging wife (Faye Dunaway) of a senator passed over for the vice-presidential nod. Linney wants Selleck to choose a Naderesque populist (Bob Gunton) for the ticket, but an icy cabal of male party bigwigs has promised him $100 million if he chooses a stout, sneering, egregiously corrupt Southern senator (Bruce McGill) who calls Linney a "bitch" but does profess to admire her "sweet little ass."

Linney is the film's have-it-both-ways heroine: fiercely ambitious but also a "patriot"—an elastic word that in this case means that she puts the "people" before the "special interests." The issue that the writer, Claudia Salter, never confronts is that—at least in this culture—contempt for "the people" is built into the process of hard-selling a candidate.

More to the point, it's built into the process of hard-selling a melodrama, which is why it's tough to take the movie's idealism too seriously. For all its paeans to the wisdom of the common man and woman, Running Mates doesn't respect them enough to present heroes and villains with more than a single dimension. It doesn't respect them enough to know that they'll roll their eyes when the candidate stands before his party's convention for the BS and announces his vice-presidential choice without, evidently, having cleared it with the fellow (or his own staff) in advance.

I say: The people deserve better.

Running Mates is a throwback to the Frank Capra era, to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and especially State of the Union (1948)—the template for this sort of melodrama. In that film, the candidate (Spencer Tracy) is a popular businessman handpicked to make a run for the presidency by voracious Republicans, among them his wealthy mistress (a young and steely Angela Lansbury—not yet ready to sell out to the Red Chinese). As a man of "the people," Tracy is unafraid to tell his audiences the truth. ("Nomination or no nomination, they've got to know where I stand before the primaries!") But he bows to his handlers, who assure him that power comes not from the people but from state chairmen and business leaders, and who quickly have him spewing tripe about family values and the need to gut government regulations.

StateOfUnion The liberal counterweight is his estranged wife (Katharine Hepburn), whose humiliation during a live radio broadcast rekindles Tracy's manhood. Hearing his spouse stammer Republican malarkey spurs his famous BS, which begins when he seizes the microphone from a panicky MC and proclaims, "I paid for this broadcast!" That rabble-rousing declaration was paraphrased by Ronald Reagan at a New Hampshire Republican debate—a Hollywood moment that many pundits felt turned his candidacy around.