That's Our President

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America has hit a new low. Not the man (although Dubya's one-man assault on the environment, workers' rights and public health is helping) but rather the office. For proof, look no further than Comedy Central's That's My Bush, the new weekly sitcom chronicling the exploits of the first family, in which the presidency is reduced to a vehicle for satirizing '80s sitcoms (apparently more relevant prey). And while the comedy of That's My Bush represents a regression (see review), its treatment of the president signals yet another step in the evolution of how we view our chosen commander in chief.

I blame Chevy Chase. He started this downward spiral back in 1975 when he began impersonating President Gerald Ford on Saturday Night Live. Of course, the president had always been fair game for political cartoonists, satirists and mimics. But Chase was not mimicking Ford. Hell, he made no attempt to look like him or sound like him. Chase was mocking him, and in the process created a new mold – one in which personality traits superseded political beliefs as the principal targets. For perhaps the first time on national television, the President of the United States was being ridiculed in a very blunt and personal manner every week – not for what he stood for but simply for who he was. Sadly, it was pretty damn funny.

Although Ford's infamous clumsiness made him a perfect target for Chase and his pratfalls, the practice of attacking the personal habits of the president has endured much more successfully than both Ford's and Chase's respective careers. With each administration since, we've been made increasingly privy to the intimate details of the president's life – especially his personal foibles and flaws. And we have eaten it up. So, Ford the Clod was succeeded by Carter the Hillbilly Wimp, who was followed by Reagan the Senile Chimp's Foil turned Henpecked Husband turned Amnesiac, who gave way to Bush the Wimp and International Vomit Monger with the Wife Who Looked 80 Years Older Than He Did (you wouldn't want to imagine those two having sex, unless of course you were a mediocre standup comic), who was then ousted by Clinton the Big Mac Chomping Philanderer and Commander in Chief of the Oral Office with the Nut-Hugging Jogging Shorts and the Nut-Busting Lesbian Wife and the Horse-Faced Daughter. Today we have a new Bush (though not exactly a new Bush administration): the Dumb-Ass Frat-Boy Former Drunk and Cokehead turned Bible Beater and Word-Mangler Whose Plain-Jane Wife has to Read the Police Blotter Report About his Underage Lush Daughter To Him. And what would Jay Leno and David Letterman do without him? Or any of the aforementioned?

But more than providing fodder for a late-night turkey shoot, this nightly analysis of the president's personal shortcomings has engendered a fundamental change in how we as a society perceive the man who holds the office and the role he plays in our psyches. In the past, the regard in which the president was held was the primary concern. "Presidential Timber," we called it. He had to be an icon, someone who commanded respect and exuded knowledge, power and skill. We wanted a hero like Washington, Jackson or Ike – someone we could admire. Or an idealist like Jefferson, Lincoln or JFK. Or even a savior like FDR. These guys stood for something. The ones who didn't measure up – the Pierces, Buchanans, Hoovers and other one-termers – got the boot. We gained our comfort from knowing that the president was an extraordinary person who had what it took to lead us through a crisis. He was the leader; we were the followers. He was a better man than we. That's why we voted for him.

In the last two elections, however, we seemed to be more concerned with electing a president to whom we can relate. After all, why put a guy up on a pedestal and try to aspire to his characteristics and ideals when it's much easier on us to elect a flawed figure with problems just like ours? He's clumsy. He's fat. He's slow on the uptake. He has trouble getting the words out. He can't keep his hands off the opposite sex. Just like us. Details like these are on the cusp of supplanting beliefs and qualifications as the primary factors in our decision-making process, as if the president's job is to make us feel better about ourselves. Bill Clinton certainly did. And so does George W. Bush, albeit in different ways with different people.

The root of this shift in emphasis is a fallacy that is embedded deep in the American psyche: the notion that all of us are equally capable of achieving power, wealth and fame. We even took the trouble of writing it into our constitution - or at least our founding fathers, who were (not coincidentally) the vested interests of the time, did. While a great premise, most of us in the lower 95% of our socioeconomic order have found the reality to be a little different. Oligarchies aren't made with constitutions, they're made with money, so why send a government to do what the natural order of capitalism can and will do much more effectively and discreetly? Nevertheless, all Americans have the ingrained notion that technically, any one of us born in the United States could one day be president – and thus could become powerful and famous.

Of course we are all kidding ourselves, but we concentrate on the only things that can subconsciously keep this notion alive: the similarities between him and us. The more we see of ourselves in the president, the more the idea is seemingly reinforced. The Gore-Bush election was a classic illustration: Gore was intelligent, well spoken and eminently qualified for the presidency. But instead of inspiring confidence in the electorate, those qualities alienated many Americans, including those who voted for him. Bush, on the other hand, with his unassuming manner, modest intellect and folksy charm, seemed more "real" to people. Even Democrats repeatedly said that he'd be a great guy to hang out with or catch a ball game with. He was accessible, and with him the presidency itself. If Bush could be president, so could we.

In this manner, Bill Clinton was the wet dream from which liberal-leaning citizens may never wake: A poor boy from a broken home rises to power and fame to bring goodness and light to America. Making matters worse is that Bush is the embodiment of a similar ideal for a large contingent of conservatives: that wealth, privilege and self-righteousness still count for something in the American power structure. But Bush's appeal to the masses represents more of a paradox. What happened this past November could only have happened to George W. Bush, the son of a former president and former head of the CIA (with basically the same fucking name) who comes from a privileged family that has heaps of money earned in an industry that constitutes one of the most powerful lobbies (and prolific sources of campaign contributions) in the country and who hails from one of the most populous states in the Union – a state in which saying "buenos dia" and other odd bits of broken Spanish to a group of unfathomably poor Mexican immigrants counts not only as progressive but also for just as much as actually spending one dime toward their plight of getting running water, paved roads and lower rents on the abandoned school buses they are renting as homes in their shantytown villages (deep breath). He is the embodiment of why one of us common folk may never be president again, and perhaps, why our country may never have a truly good president again (more on this later).

Now, one could also make the argument (especially given the tirade above) that we have taken to picking on the president because we cannot relate to him. Maybe we're jealous of the advantages – whether in terms of wealth, skill or good fortune – that he was able to draw upon to climb the ladder of his party and get elected. And perhaps that jealousy turns to spite when we are given the chance to ridicule him and knock him down to size. But this theory does not explain the high approval ratings that Reagan, Bush and Clinton generally enjoyed (absent economic troubles) throughout their terms and that Dubya is enjoying now, despite a sputtering economy and an emerging energy crisis. For Clinton's sake, pollsters even split "approval rating" into two categories: job performance and character. Andrew Jackson was no Mr. Congeniality in his day, but was the public's opinion of his personality dissected and splashed across The New York Times with a series of pie graphs?

In reality, presidents past have harbored no more or less skeletons and unpleasant personal habits than their contemporaries. JFK had an eye for the ladies. Jefferson smoked dope and got friendly with his help. Taft was a veritable dirigible. And can you imagine the paraplegic jokes that Roosevelt would suffer at the hands of Conan O'Brien's writers? Yes, the old-timers had it easy. Today, all of these flaws and more are fair game. The feeding frenzy fuelled by these faults sells newspapers and sells ad space on late-night TV, but it also sells the president out.

Which brings us back to the question of whether we will ever have a good president again. I mean, who in their right mind would want a job like this? What dignified and distinguished person would want to subject him or herself to this kind of puerile, vicious and relentless scrutiny? Or better yet, to what kind of person is the fame and power worth such an ordeal? Unfortunately, we are setting our own table for a steady diet of one of two courses: (a) the slick liberal politician driven by chronic insecurity and deep-seeded self-hatred who uses eloquence, idealism and personal magnetism to garner the personal attention he thrives on, and then (b) the self-righteous pragmatist who comes in to clean up the former's mess, and in the process, sets himself and his cronies up for life. No need to wrap the leftovers, thank you.

A more important question is: why have we as a society embraced this way of thinking so readily? Is this part of a more mature and realistic outlook on our behalf – eschewing dated notions of an ennobled commander in chief who is mythical in ability and unerring in judgment in favor of a practical viewpoint that acknowledges that the president is human and has his share of shortcomings? Did Richard Nixon forever rob us of our ability to believe in our chosen leader and take him seriously? Or have we lost faith in our ability as a society to choose a leader wisely?

Maybe it's not so much that we relate to the president and his faults but rather that we cannot relate to the world we have asked him to shape, control and protect us from. Greenhouse gasses? The implications of a space-based missile defense system on the nuclear arsenals of the former republics of the Soviet Union? The trade-offs of spurring the growth of nuclear power versus subsidizing facilities that burn a combination of coal, oil and wood chips for energy versus sending our military halfway around the world to fight to keep the supply of friendly oil to the United States sufficient to allow fuel prices to remain steady and thus take the pressure off U.S. auto makers to develop engines that run on alternate fuel sources? We don't get it. Or perhaps better yet, we don't want to get it.

But if the Commander in Chief falls down the stairs at McDonald's before heading to the county jail to bail out his daughter or comes on to the new intern before vomiting his sushi all over a visiting dignitary...well, that's something we can probably all relate to. And most important of all, it makes for great TV. Whether it will ever make for a great president remains to be seen.