![]() There are strong men who control weak men (yes, mainly men, although not exclusively). ![]() ![]() There is treachery, but it’s mainly suburban and small rather than grandly operatic. There are more stuff-ups than conspiracies. One inch forward, a great slide backwards. So what is politics in reality, away from the gloss of cable TV drama? Mostly punishing incremental work. The Shakespearean asides to camera allow Underwood the luxury of perfect communication, allowing his intentions to be clear to the audience at all times – a quality that the sludgy political communicators of the real world, with their dog-eared talking points dreamed up by a kid in a room at 4am, can only envy. His brand of ruthlessness is as perfect, uncluttered and elegant as Robin Wright’s couture wardrobe on the show. In House of Cards it is Underwood’s evil which is the burnished, high gloss perfection at the centre of the piece. It’s the underlying condition behind those wise-cracking, walk-and-talk progressive brainiacs of The West Wing the brilliant subversiveness of Malcolm Tucker, who can spin himself free of any tight spot the studious imperfections of the woman driven as a kind of compulsion to deploy consensus politics for the greater national good - Denmark’s Brigitte Nyborg. The most compelling political dramas usually subsist on a pernicious but enduring myth: that perfection is possible in politics. It really is too much – and if you weren’t completely addicted and hadn’t entirely sucumbed to the experience and begged for more, you’d actually laugh. It is, of course, a fantasy – as all of the boilovers of political history can readily attest. This of course is another great myth of politics – the uncluttered power of the strong-man, the kingmaker who trades only in pin-point treachery and possesses the perfect strategy and the means of executing it without mess or digressions. He has everyone’s measure, and their weaknesses are his strength. They might struggle with the yoke at the beginning, but ultimately they move as pawns on his chessboard. Guardian Australia's deputy political editor watches the TV series House of Cards, and compares it to what she witnessed in years of political reporting
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