He was a great actor and a brave man.

From an article by Daniel Finkelstein:

The night after he spoke to the 2004 Republican convention .. Ron said that he expected many of his Hollywood liberal friends would cut him off. It was something he didn’t relish, but he was ready for it. He thought it a price worth paying to be able to say what he thought.

Why should doing what he did have been so rare and so brave? And why did it have such a high price?

For most of his career Ron was an emblematic Hollywood liberal Democrat. He was president of Actors’ Equity for a decade, established the Creative Coalition liberal lobby group with artists such as Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin, stumped the country for Bill Clinton and was a prominent campaigner for abortion rights. But after 9/11 Ron went one way, and his liberal friends another. He believed that the fight against Islamism was a fight for his liberal values and he thought that his erstwhile allies didn’t take it seriously enough.

In Hollywood, supporting Bush on any grounds was completely unacceptable.

Group think is a dangerous thing – and it takes courage to stand against it. Thanks Ron.