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  1. Entertainment
  2. Movies

50 Slimiest Movie Politicians

Features
By Kim Sheehan published 26 September 2012

The votes are in and have in no way been tampered with... Warning: SPOILERS

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Thomas Jefferson Johnson (The Distinguished Gentleman)

The Politician: Florida con man Thomas Jefferson Johnson (Eddie Murphy) decides to run for Congress when the current Congressman and his namesake dies of a heart attack.

Johnson uses the dead Congressman's campaign material and gets voted in when enough people vote for the name they recognise.

Slimiest Moment: Johnson's winning speech in which he knowingly strings together a series of senseless catch phrases to sound triumphant.

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Starting with "We campaigned on the issue. The issue is change. Change for the future." and finishing with "Read my lips" the speech worryingly feels like it could have been lifted from any political campaign throughout history.

Jay Bullington Bulworth (Bulworth)

The Politician: Senator Jay Bullington Bulworth (Warren Beatty), a veteran Democrat, begins to fall out of favour with voters and thus starts to lose his bid for re-election to a much more appealing, younger opponent.

Unhappy, approaching financial ruin and generally tired of life, Bulworth decides to end it all via a hired assassin and a large life-insurance policy scam.

Slimiest Moment: Aware that the end is nigh, Bulworth decides to go off the rails hitting night clubs and smoking marijuana.

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This leads to him embarrassingly rapping a speech on business.

Yes, rapping.

Willie Stark (All The King's Men)

The Politician: Willie Stark (Sean Penn) starts off an idealistic small-town lawyer who is pushed into campaigning to become a Louisiana Governor.

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When Stark realises that he was put up to the race to lose, he vows to never be duped again. He runs for Governor a second time eventually wins using any means possible.

Slimiest Moment: Once in power, Stark quickly embraces using corruption and intimidation for his own personal and political gain.

His lowest moment occurs when he demands his friend and advisor Jack Burden (Jude Law) to dig up dirt on his chief critic Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins) - the very man that raised up Burden.

The Candidate (1972)

The Politician: Young Democratic Californian lawyer and candidate for senator Bill McKay is probably the least deserving of the slimy tag in this list.

He enters the political race against an unassailable opponent not to win, but to take the opportunity to spread some his ideas and draw attention to some vital issues.

However, when the likelihood of him winning the position appears to change, so does he…

Slimiest Moment: When McKay is in the full throngs of his own self deception, selling out and becoming California's biggest political heartthrob, he has a revealing mini breakdown in the back of a car in which he repeats his nonsense catch phrases to himself: "Vote once, vote twice, vote for Bill McKay… You middle-class honkies!"

The President (Wag The Dog)

The Politician: An unnamed (and barely seen) President of United States gets himself caught in a predicament so scandalous that his spin doctor (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood movie producer (Dustin Hoffman) have to stage a fake war with Albania to divert the media's attention on the run up to the election.

Slimiest Moment: The initial scandal which prompts the mass media manipulation.

The President gets caught making advances on an underage Firefly girl inside the Oval Office while her troupe are touring the White House.

David Brice (No Way Out)

The Politician: Secretary of Defence David Brice (Gene Hackman) should be focusing on the future of a Navy submarine project but he gets distracted when he discovers his lover Susan is seeing someone else besides him.

He slaps Susan while in a jealous rage, causing her to plunge to her death.

Slimiest Moment: If accidentally killing his lover isn't enough, when he then becomes very much implicated in her murder he shifts the blame to his friend and colleague General counsel Pritchard and falsely exposes him as a sleeper agent after the General commits suicide.

Jack Hathaway (The Contender)

The Politician: Wholesome Virginian Governor and wannabe Vice President Jack Hathaway is hailed as a hero after he dives into a lake in a failed attempt to save a drowning woman.

Therefore no-one is more surprised than him when the President opts to nominate no-name Laine Hanson for the VP spot instead.

Especially as she soon becomes shamed in a sex scandal.

Slimiest Moment: The sickening moment in which the President reveals FBI evidence which shows that Hathaway actually paid the deceased woman to drive off a bridge into the lake in a stunt deliberately engineered to increase his approval ratings.

Senator Aaron McComb (Time Cop)

The Politician: Senator Aaron McComb (Ron Silver) leads the oversight committee of the Time Enforcement Commission - the regularity body combatting the misuse of time travel. However, McComb himself is abusing his position to raise money through the 1929 U.S. stock-market crash for his presidential campaign.

Slimiest Moment: McComb is brimming with his own self-importance when he lectures Time Cop Max Walker (Jean-Claude Van Damme): "I'm an ambitious Harvard-educated visionary who deserves to be the most powerful man in the world and you... you're a fucking idiot who never figured out that the only way to make anything of himself with all that fancy kicking was on Broadway". Zing.

Bob Roberts (Bob Roberts)

The Politician: Conservative Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins) is the all American man: a millionaire businessman, fencing enthusiast , recording artist and a Republican Senatorial candidate.

He leads his campaign urging everyone else to reach for the American dream.

Slimiest Moment: After an assassination attempt supposedly paralyses Roberts from the waist down, he becomes a national martyr and wins his election.

However, he is later seen tapping his feet at his own victory party...

Kim Jong-il (Team America: World Police)

The Politician: Thunderbird-esque puppet and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il's hobbies include raising man eating sharks, supplying international terrorists with weapons of mass destruction and occasionally expressing his loneliness via song.

Slimiest Moment: Jong-il commits a lot of crimes in Team America: World Police but nothing quite as devastating as when he takes out beloved actor Alec Baldwin with an assault rifle.

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