The 1999 high school student-council comedy Election, the first film in which Reese Witherspoon flashed her potential as a serious actress, was seen by many as an allegory of the 1992 presidential election - with Witherspoon's ambitious social climber Tracy Flick standing in for George Bush I, frat-like party boy Chris Klein playing the role of frat-like party boy Bill Clinton, and Klein's anti-establishment lesbian sister Candace Campbell, with her is-she-in-or-out-of-the-race dramatics, fitting the Ross Perot profile to a T. These allegorical elements were central to the novel by Tom Perotta, and accentuated memorably by the actors and director Alexander Payne.

Now, three years after Election and one year into her newfound status as Hollywood's premiere under-30 actress, Reese Witherspoon is starring in yet another picture whose plot is eerily reminiscent of a recent presidential election- this time the film is Sweet Home Alabama and the election is that of 2000, when urban Democratic "blue' states collided with the rural Republican "red" parts of the country in the closest presidential election in a half-century, one that took five weeks after Election Day to solve. And while it's in the guise of a standard-issue romantic triangle-based comedy, just about everything in Sweet Home Alabama is indicative of the blue/red conflict. And somewhat shockingly for a mainstream Hollywood movie, the film leans quite decisively towards the red side of the ledger.

Much like Witherspoon's previous hit film, Legally Blonde, Sweet Home Alabama is a comedy about culture clash. But while the earlier movie explored conflicts between two relatively bourgeois worlds (West Coast surfer/mall culture and Harvard Law School good-old-boy conservatism), Sweet Home's script (by Douglas J. Eboch and C. Jay Cox) delves into the conflict between the much more different worlds of high New York fashion and lowbrow Alabama country life.

Witherspoon stars as Melanie Carmichael, New York's latest hot fashion designer, who has just debuted her new, highly successful line of clothes and is dating the son (Patrick Dempsey) of the city's mayor. When Andrew (the boyfriend) proposes marriage by closing Tiffany's after hours and letting her pick whichever ring she wants, all seems right in Melanie's life - but there's just the tiny matter of going back to her home state of Alabama to obtain a divorce from her swarthy high school lover Jake (Josh Lucas). Upon reaching her home state Melanie is at first repulsed by the life she had left behind, but later rediscovers the charm of her previous small-town existence, and realizes she's got a choice to make between the two very different lives, and the two very different men, whose merits seem roughly equal. Just as America's electorate had to make the choice between two very different men in November of 2000, resulting in a near-tie.

Dempsey's character may look a lot like John F. Kennedy, Jr. and share both a first name and political pedigree with Andrew Cuomo, but in actuality he's a stand-in for Al Gore: the stuffy and snooty scion of a Democratic political dynasty who, while well-intentioned, just can't seem to connect with regular people no matter how hard he tries. Contrast him with Jake, who may be considerably less educated, intelligent, and articulate than his "opponent," but he's got the looks, charm, and traditional masculinity going for him, and in the end that's what puts him over the top - indeed, just like George W. Bush.