Okay, I’ll admit it. I have very mixed emotions about celebrities spouting off on political issues, even when they say things I agree with. Take George Clooney for example. The man is a classic, throwback Hollywood star - the Cary Grant of our time - AND he’s got classic, throwback policy beliefs to match. In a town where too often the face of Hollywood politics is that of a conspiracy nut like Oliver Stone or a latter-day Yippie charlatan like Michael Moore, Clooney harkens back to an era of mainstream nuts-and-bolts liberal-progressive ideology in a way that’s both old-fashioned and refreshing. If anything, Clooney is a Roosevelt Democrat, a man who thinks governments are supposed to govern, i.e., to fix things, to make life better. His very pragmatic solutions to problems like the crisis in Darfur (diplomacy, sanctions, carefully calibrated UN intervention, food aid and medical relief) or the alarm bells he’s sounded in his work over neo-McCarthyism (in Good Night, and Good Luck) and corporate malfeasance (Michael Clayton) have an easy moral authority to them that somehow seems to short-circuit the argumentative left/right talking points passing for political discussion in today’s USA, and to appeal to an audience that is both broad and appreciative.

But even though Clooney is a likable, persuasive and photogenic spokesperson for some ideas I think need an airing, it troubles me that a movie actor has become a serious force in matters that really require massive governmental solutions. I’m not saying, as some do, that a “mere” actor shouldn’t meddle in political matters. For one thing, I live in a state run by an actor, and despite some grousing from both sides of the political spectrum, I think the Last Action Hero is doing a pretty good job herding California’s legislative cats. Clooney, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, is as much a successful entrepreneur as he is a celebrity, and the last time I checked, we LIKE to recruit entrepreneurs from virtually any other business into our statehouses and governmental office buildings, because we think of ourselves as having problems, and of them as people who know how to SOLVE.

But actors - like most private citizens - don’t have their hands on the levers that need to be punched and pulled to get vast matters of state taken care of. Clooney can get through almost any door, because people want to get next to the man to bask in reflected glory and get pictures to show their children. But I almost always look at the images of him standing next to ambassadors and governors, U.N. presidents and candidates, and feel a sense of unreality, like I’m looking at what historian Daniel Boorstin called a “pseudo-event” - a photo-op created to make it APPEAR like something is being taken seriously when in fact in many ways it is not.

Still, it’s hard not to notice that something vital in our relationship to celebrity is changing. Bono, Angelina Jolie, Clooney, Don Cheadle - these aren’t just people who SEEM to be doing something. These are people doing significant things in a significant way, and their dedication to the causes they espouse seems noble, altruistic, sincere and total. In the era of the 24-hour-all-Britney-news-cycle, maybe celebrity has at last become such a form of currency that its value is like the Euro's: high, and still rising.

Look at the presidential campaign. It’s a supposed truism that celebrity political endorsements are worth a news cycle at best, and that they don’t really change things. Is that true any more, in the age of YouTube? I think Mike Huckabee might give you an argument there, because it was arguably Chuck Norris’s willingness to cut humorous campaign commercials with him and to stand behind him while he made speeches that created the most lasting image of his surprisingly successful insurgent campaign.

Then there’s the Nicholson factor, and its impact on the Democratic side. In the run up to the Ohio and Texas primaries back in February, Hillary Clinton seemed down for the count. Obama was in the midst of an uninterrupted twelve state victory run, gathering up delegates by the hundreds and grabbing the front-runner status away from Clinton that she had enjoyed for the better part of a year.

Then Jack Nicholson cut a brilliant campaign spot that combined iconic footage of his performances in Batman, A Few Good Men, Chinatown, The Shining, and Five Easy Pieces with generic endorsement text and the simple on-camera assertion “I’m Jack Nicholson, and I approved this message.” The genius of this ad wasn’t just the careful selection of clips from Nicholson’s most iconic performances. It was that in some odd way, the CHARACTERS Nicholson has played over the years (and therefore the real reason we care about Jack in the way that he’s mattered to us most) seemed to be getting into the act and endorsing his candidate too. Over two million online views later, Clinton won both Ohio and Texas, and she was back in the race, with momentum to spare.

Keep this in mind: the Nicholson and Norris commercials were primarily distributed online through YouTube and comparable web-hosting sites, and that means they were watched virally by people who chose to see them and paid attention, and also that they were largely circulated for FREE. That makes the celebrity endorsement literally worth its weight - or far more than its weight - in gold in the hyper-expensive American political game as it’s currently played.

Point being: the nexus of mutual back-scratching, photo-op publicity-seeking and celebrity cross-pollination that has always existed between Hollywood and Washington is reaching new kinds of culminations these days, its value climbing as recklessly and unpredictably as the price of a barrel of oil. It probably says something a little sad about American politics that this is so, but don’t blame the politically active stars for a system they didn’t create. As people whose professional lives consist of getting paid a lot of money to pretend to be important, they may be creatures of imaginary moral authority to greater and lesser degrees. But the leadership vacuum they’re trying to fill isn’t imaginary in the least.