'Fahrenheit 9/11' Is a Red-Hot Ticket

"The American people can tell the difference between fact and fiction," says campaign spokesman Terry Holt. "This election is about serious issues, and I don't think most American voters consider Michael Moore a serious analyst of American politics."

Privately, however, some White House officials say they are in a bind about how to respond. Americans have always formed impressions of public figures from the movies; think Oliver Stone's "JFK," Spike Lee's "Malcolm X," Charlton Heston's portrayal of Moses. This time is different because the subject is living, unfolding history, four months before an election.

The documentary includes endless shots of Bush golfing, taking vacations and shaking hands with Saudi oil tycoons at fancy hotels. Moore revives the old pre-Iraq war stereotype of Bush as a hapless, inarticulate bungler but with a twist; Bush is portrayed as lazy, a failure of will and not genes.

"It's so easy to say that Bush is an idiot," Moore said in an interview yesterday. "But I don't say it. You just let his own words and his own pictures do it."

In one already infamous scene, the president is shown on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just after an aide whispers to him that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. He's sitting before an elementary school class, reading "My Pet Goat." He continues to sit with the children as seven minutes tick by, his expression tense but inscrutable.

"Was he wondering if maybe he should have showed up to work more often?" Moore's voice-over asks.

This may be a cheap shot, exaggerated, distorted, taken out of context, as the president's defenders argue. But even so, an image like this can stick. For just those reasons, one faction within the Bush camp argued for the Richard Clarke treatment -- blitzing the airwaves with administration officials to offer repetitive, factual-sounding point-by-point rebuttals.

But that faction lost. If a reporter asks President Bush about the movie, he plans to respond jokingly, one of his strategists said. "To take it on would give it too much credibility," the strategist said. "He's not going to get into a debate himself with this little filmmaker guy."

Moore doesn't think the strategy will work. "There's nothing the White House can do about it now," he said. "They're not going to be able to ignore it, because there's going to be too much conversation about it."

For their part, neither Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, nor anyone in his campaign has said anything about the movie out of concern that "we will get stuck with all that Michael Moore baggage," said one senior adviser.

At any rate, Moore hardly spares mainstream Democrats. He calls the party "weak-kneed and wimpy," and the movie shows Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who was at the Uptown last night, and former presidential candidate Richard Gephardt sitting on stools voicing their approval for the war.

"The movie poses a conundrum for John Kerry," Moore said. "You can't watch the last hour of this movie and leave the theater and not at least pose the question to him: How could you have voted for this war?"

In this latest movie Moore has been praised for having matured as a filmmaker, but his worldview hasn't changed much since "Roger and Me" -- history can be explained by tracing connections between rich people and their friends.

Much of the factual squabbling so far between Bush and Moore supporters involve the movie's portrayal of business relationships between the Bush and bin Laden families. Issues include whether Bush approved planes to carry Saudis, including bin Ladens, out of the country right after Sept. 11, 2001, before they could be interviewed by the FBI and whether Salem bin Laden invested in Bush's Texas oil company. With his rapid editing, racing from fact to fact, Moore leaves the impression that Bush and his cronies stood to benefit not just from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but from Sept. 11.