【2007 Archives】

Star Wars may007 Archivesescapist space fantasy set a long time ago, but there are times when it can feel like up-to-the-minute political commentary.

We're not just talking about the fact that the run-up to Tuesday's vote feels about as tense as Luke Skywalker's Death Star trench run -- or that, with polls bouncing all over the place, you'd be equally well advised to turn off your guidance computer and trust in the Force.

There's also the essential debate that has dogged us for the entire campaign season -- that is, which Star Wars characters best represent the main party candidates.

Is Hillary Clinton a heroic Princess Leia or a doomed Senator Amidala? Is Donald Trump a cunning Emperor Palpatine, a tragically tyrannical Darth Vader -- or perhaps a Tatooine-based crime lord?

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Trump has been jokingly compared to Palpatine on and off for months, starting with his RNC speech. He was compared to Vader in a video from the brilliant Star Wars satirizers the Auralnauts as early as 2015.

There's a vague physical resemblance to Palpatine, at least -- Trump would probably look good in a cloak -- but I never bought it.

After all, the evil Emperor (a.k.a. Sith master Darth Sidious) was the master of the long game. Palpatine's scheme to destroy the Jedi by getting himself elected to supreme leadership was hatched decades before he put it into action.

Trump may have a few good strategists on his side, and a natural sense of what plays well on TV. But if he ever had a longterm game plan, it was too easy to knock him off it.

It's hard to imagine Palpatine publicly disparaging the family of a deceased Clone Wars hero, or angrily tweeting "check out sex tape" about a Coruscant beauty pageant winner at 3 a.m.

Jabba the Hutt, on the other hand, is a perfect fit -- as Carrie Fisher first suggested back in August. But the comparison has become even more accurate since then.

Think about it: He's a businessman who likes to take bizarre forms of revenge on workers who cross him. Unable to simply await a small payment, he had Han Solo hunted down, encased in carbonite, and hung on his wall like a Trump Foundation trophy. (We presume the 6-foot portrait of Jabba was just out of shot.)

Jabba's worst vice, of course, was leering at and abusing scantily-clad women. I'll never be able to see the scenes set in his Tatooine palace the same way again.

In Episode I, we learn that Jabba also loves the adoration of a stadium crowd, and likes to officiate at a rigged sporting event -- albeit podracing rather than the WWE.

And it's not giving away much to reveal that Jabba was ultimately defeated by a woman he had demanded be put in chains. Spoiler alert!

As for Clinton, it's tempting to connect her with Padme Amidala -- another lifelong politician who served with distinction in the Senate and fell in love with a brilliant, flawed man.

Neither are particularly talented at the art of speechmaking (witness Padme's monotone delivery in Episode Iand her lengthy ramble on the subject of democracy in Episode II). Both suffered longterm consequences from a disastrous war vote -- though Clinton's support for the Iraq invasion, which she later regretted, pales next to Padme's insane decision to let Jar Jar Binks fill in for her in the Senate, whereupon the Gungan was promptly duped into giving Palpatine war powers.

And in the unlikely event of Clinton having to concede the election in New York on Tuesday night, she could point to the Trump party uptown and borrow Padme's famous line from Episode III: "So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause!"

The Leia connection makes more sense, however. Not just because she stayed calm and defeated the giant slug while the men on her team ran around in a panic, or because she was repeatedly hounded for the simple act of placing information on a private server -- in the mobile form of an R2 unit.

It's that Leia spent much of her political life with the odds stacked heavily against her. It's a toss-up as to which is worse: fighting the Galactic Empire, or fighting the GOP, the KKK, FBI rogue agents and the Russian intelligence services all at the same time.

If you've read the Claudia Gray book Bloodline, one of the best of the new Star Wars canon, you know that what happened after the fall of the Empire wasn't any better. Strangely mistrusted by a large part of the body politic in the restored Republic, Leia finds herself brokering compromise between the Populists and the Centrists, and calling for calm in the wake of a terrorist attack.

She also investigates a casino tied to the Hutt family and finds evidence of a plot to bring down the Republic by someone in the shadows -- a plot that seems too big to have been cooked up by creatures as unintelligent as Jabba and his kin.

And then, in the most heartbreaking moment of the book, Leia runs for the newly created post of First Senator -- only to have someone she thought was an ally reveal a damaging piece of information at the worst possible moment, James Comey-style.

Leia lives to fight another day, as we saw in The Force Awakens-- though the forces arrayed against her and her family just keep getting more overwhelming and less reasonable.

It's a good thing this all happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, rather than, say, after Nov. 8.