Ms. Brown Goes to Washington

“Do I look presidential enough?”

Blair Brown asks the question with customary modesty as she’s being photographed under a Wilshire District church alcove that remarkably resembles a government building in Washington.

Brown, an actress gifted with the ability to put other people at ease and usually not prone to concerns about image, is thinking a lot about image and presidential politics on this sweltering day spent filming “Majority Rule.”

The Lifetime movie--shot throughout Los Angeles during the August heat wave and premiering Tuesday--stars Brown as the first woman nominated for President of the United States. The sometime-in-the-near-future scenario is the final entry in the cable network’s “Women and Politics” election-year programming.

As her makeup artist applies the finishing touches to Brown’s face and trademark auburn hair, the actress mouths the words to an important speech her character makes in the next scene. Brown had worked with David Taylor, the film’s combination screenwriter-speech writer, to make a few eleventh-hour changes and is intent on giving the words the right impact.

A few minutes later, after she completes the speech, an attack on the film’s fictional incumbent as a “Mr. Can not Do” president “locked away in the White House or his vacation home” (“vacation home” was one of Brown’s ideas), she yells “Yes!” and holds up an off-camera victory fist while members of the cast and crew applaud.

Clearly, this is not Molly Dodd running for President.

“Thank God for Lifetime,” Brown says later about the cable network that continued her critically adored but narrowly watched series, “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” for three years after NBC canceled it in 1988.

No doubt Lifetime is also thanking Brown. The 43-year-old actress, who flirted with stardom in the early 1980s when she stole the spotlight in three feature films (“Altered States,” “A Flash of Green” and “Continental Divide”) only to see it pass by as she focused on raising her young son, has become fairly hot again. Brown, though, would certainly laugh at that category or the notion that she ever cared.

Last year she turned 360 degrees from cult dramedy as the high-class, self-destructive call girl in ABC’s “Those Secrets.” Not long before, Brown starred in NBC’s “Extreme Close-Up,” playing a manic-depressive mother in a moving movie of the week.

But all that is ancient history for Brown as she discusses the new movie--and next week’s election--during a break in her air-conditioned trailer.

“I love this (playing a presidential candidate),” she says. “I can’t do anything else. I can’t wait for it to be over so I can get onto other things and read other things and be part of the world. Because I am fairly obsessed.”

She laughs, but her self-observation rings true when she explains how she prepared for the role of a three-star U.S. general who returns from a desert military operation as a national hero and is catapulted into a grass-roots campaign for the Oval Office, scandal and all (during the stumping it is revealed Gen. Katherine Taylor had an abortion as a young woman).

Along with reading biographies of Harry S. Truman and the recently published memoirs of former presidential adviser Clark Clifford, “I watched a lot of tapes of great speeches--Martin Luther King Jr. and Kennedy, the obvious.”

Some days during filming, the dialogue and speech rewrites seemed to jump right off that morning’s headlines, Brown said. While footage was being shot on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in New York in June, a woman came up to Brown and asked her if she would be proud to support Katherine Taylor.

“All of a sudden I had to spin out my character’s platform. What she is really talking about is participation, because she is a citizen who’s come forward herself. Her campaign is about not offering promises, but offering challenges.”

Candidate Taylor, Brown adds, “probably isn’t as good a mother as her husband is a father. I think that’s really nice. Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you’re necessarily gifted at mothering. It may not be the thing that you do best. I’m sure some people may be irritated by (me saying that).”

John Getz plays her little-seen husband in the film and describes the man behind the woman as a “SNAG” (sensitive new age gentleman); John Glover has the part of the campaign manager.

The film never mentions specific political parties (Taylor’s platform will appear to be more Democratic because of the Republican stance on abortions), but Brown is definitely on the Democratic side this year.

Her active participation was shocking even to her because the rebellious Brown of the ‘60s-- the same one raised in Washington the daughter of a CIA analyst--had always thought politics untrustworthy of her attention.

Before the first 1992 state primary, however, she was delivering Bill Clinton videotapes door-to-door. Brown laughs now at the image. “Here’s me, Miss Molly Dodd, knocking on doors on a Saturday morning in New Hampshire. These people were sort of reeling.”

But Brown is quick to disassociate her Molly persona from “Majority Rule.”

“Molly doesn’t figure anywhere in this deal. It’s interesting, though,” she says with a slightly mischievous grin. “About 10 years ago Martin Sheen and I did this miniseries about the Kennedys and I played the wife. I thought, ‘Well, see, we have come somewhere.’ ”

“Majority Rule” airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. on Lifetime.