It has become a fashionable conceit that Hollywood's rebel of the moment has recently been filling the vacuum where you might think the US opposition would be.
Admittedly, George Clooney is unlikely to begin forensically scrutinising every piece of Republican legislation, or write a paper on where the federal government went wrong with Hurricane Katrina.
But he and many others clearly feel that his two current films, Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana, are effective allegorical critiques of current politics and the Bush administration.
As Mark Lawson wrote recently, "George Clooney has become the commander in chief of Hollywood's anti-Bush forces".
While he did not speak much about the Democrats, Clooney told a slightly breathless Kirsty Wark on Newsnight Review on Friday that the US media had not been properly criticising the administration in recent years.
He said there was a great fear of being depicted as non-patriotic which he said had only started to come to an end because of the failures around Katrina.
The actor spoke quite powerfully about how he was proud to be denounced by elements of the right as a traitor after he publicly opposed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. For example he has been called a traitor on playing cards, which presumably were supposed to recall the deck given to US troops hunting Saddam Hussein regime figures after the invasion.
Clooney told Wark:
"I think it's important to be on the right side of history. I want to be on that deck of cards. And I want to be able to say that they boycotted my films ... I want to be able to say I was on the cover of a magazine called Traitor. I'm proud of those because those were badges of honour for me because that was when you did it when it was hard to do."
He said he had started to make the movies more than two years ago at a "very quiet time" in America "where journalism had taken a pass on asking questions". He said: "The most patriotic thing you can do in a country is question the government."
Wark asked him how he felt about being compared to Michael Moore and he indicated that he did not want to become such a polarising figure as that. He wanted his films to be seen by as big a constituency as possible and not just people who already agreed with where he was coming from.
He repeated his line that he was not interested in standing for political office - Wark obviously hoped he would give her a scoop by announcing he wanted to run for Congress like his dad did, or even the White House. Clooney has, in fact, signalled that he backs Barack Obama, the 45-year-old black senator from Illinois for the 2008 nomination.
Despite being so widely praised at the moment, the actor spoke magnanimously about how his power to green light films was for a finite time and would be over all too soon. He said he wanted to make the best of it, while he had it.
Certainly it seems a long time since Batman and Robin.
