Campaign diversity gets real
WASHINGTON -- "Live Free or Die Hard" may be the first summer action movie of the Age of Hillary -- a machismo-fest in which women slug it out with men without any irony or surprise.
When the brainy cybervillain played by Maggie Q squares off against Bruce Willis's action hero, the punches are fierce and head-on. Frazier and Ali didn't hit each other this hard.
Women have been fighting in movies for a while now, but it's usually been presented as a revenge fantasy or a show of pluck, like Keira Knightley picking up a sword in "Pirates of the Caribbean." The men fighting against them usually bug out their eyes with amazement, as if whapping a woman would violate both playground rules and the Code of Decency.
The surprise with Willis is how naturally and unhesitatingly he goes at Maggie Q. It's a refreshingly non condescending burst of violence. And when he finally dispatches her, and calls her terrorist partner to gloat, he makes casual reference to her race (Asian) without drawing any protests outside the cinema, so far.
"Live Free or Die Hard" is a post chivalry, post feminism, post-political correctness movie, and it may have found its moment: The presidential campaign has largely been conducted the same way.
Yes, there was a kerfuffle when Senator Joe Biden of Delaware referred to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois as a "clean" African-American candidate, but it went away after Obama expressed concern and Biden apologized. And while nearly everyone believes that race and gender will emerge as factors in the presidential race, there is growing evidence that they might not be factors in quite the same ways as in the past.
Not long ago, presidential candidacies by women and people of color were greeted with a mixture of excitement by long-excluded voting groups at seeing one of their own on the ballot, and condescension by the rest of the political establishment. The candidate would be publicly welcomed and included in debates, but privately written off as an oddity -- a protest candidacy with the race or gender of the candidate the sole form of protest.
This year, as a black man and a woman generate the most excitement in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination -- with a Latino candidate also making a strong run -- many believed it would be different. And indeed it has been.
Senator Hillary Clinton of New York faced more gender-related blowback as first lady, when she tried to update that traditional role, than she has as a presidential candidate. And the main racial issue to touch New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's candidacy has been his own lament: Voters don't realize he's Hispanic.
At last weekend's candidate forum on Latino issues, Richardson lampooned the old notion that candidates would get a free pass from their own ethnic group. "I'm the only Latino in the race -- give me a break!" he quipped, when the moderator warned him his time was up.
The fact that neither Richardson nor Obama nor Clinton has a monopoly on support from his or her own group does much to enhance their legitimacy: They're not running on identity politics. They're also not being received that way, which suggests a growing confidence among all voters that identity matters less than character.
Nonetheless, candidates who come from underrepresented groups face special hurdles. Obama's initial failure to condemn racist statements by influential shock jock Don Imus set him up for special criticism, even though other candidates were equally slow to distance themselves from Imus. Clinton, as a woman, has to walk a fine line between seeming too tough and too soft.
These pressures are more likely to harm a candidate from an underrepresented group, since there are fewer role models to emulate when the going gets tough. But such pressures aren't fundamentally different from those facing white males: The frequent sniping about John Edwards's "pretty" looks suggests that white men need to have as many wattles on their necks and as much gravel in their voice as actor-politician Fred Thompson to be considered sufficiently presidential.
Thompson, the former Tennessee senator who's running for the GOP presidential nomination, has had a long career in movies -- including "Die Hard 2" in 1990, in which he played the chief air-traffic controller of an airport under siege. He has played authority figures in numerous action movies, but he might be surprised at how much the cinematic power structure has changed: In this year's "Die Hard," there are authority figures of both genders from numerous racial and ethnic groups.
These diverse characters aren't cast to telegraph the movie's good intentions, but rather its determination to have broad appeal at the domestic and international box office. They're there for essentially the same reason as the white male authority figures. And that's a sign of progress.
Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond. 
