Being and Seeming

It is all too easy to make fun of presidents, particularly since they have come to be judged by the standards by which we judge fictional characters who appear on our TV screens. It's ridiculous and it's unfair. TV characters appear in a show that lasts twenty-two minutes, once a week, twenty-six or thirty-nine times a year. The TV character gets retakes and his mistakes become outtakes. Jerry Ford bumps his head and his defined as a bumbler for the rest of his life. Richard Nixon tries, and fails, to pry the cap off the aspirin bottle with his teeth one night and it becomes a character-revealing trait, implying an unimaginable depth of dysfunction. Jimmy Carter has a run-in with a rabbit and is forever after labeled boob and wimp.

Then there's the sex business. For example, there are persistent rumors that [George H.W.] Bush has girlfriends. Remember that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," look at Barbara, and there are three possibilities: George is a normal male attracted to younger women and he cheats. George chooses to have sex exclusively with a woman who looks like a Hallmark greeting card grandmother; George is a eunuch. Think about it -- which George would you want running our country?

The only guy who could handle being "on-camera" every public minute and come out of it looking good was the guy who spent his life "on-camera," Ronald Reagan.

If the experiment with Bill Clinton is no more satisfactory than those with Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Bush, then perhaps Reagan will turn out to be the harbinger of things to come and the practice of having someone "act" as president will be institutionalized.

Larry Beinhart
American Hero (1993)

Beinhart's point is a valid one, but now we have a situation where the guy in the White House can't do either thing with any success. Bush obviously is incapable of being the president, but he's also pretty damn bad at appearing to be the president.

Couldn't the powers-that-be in the Republican party who were behind the sudden ascendance of George W. Bush into a viable candidate for the presidency have found someone just a little better at, at the very least, faking being presidential? Or was it that Bush's malleability and inability to do anything on his own (due to lack of the necessity of doing so throughout his life) made him the perfect candidate to be manipulated by Cheney as the power behind the throne, and those factors overwhelmed Bush's curious lack of ability to present a presidential persona on anything but a severely limited basis under the very best (and most constrictingly controlled) of circumstances. Hell, I could hold a casting call here in New York, and I'm sure I could find a couple of dozen actors who could look and act like a president for the short amounts of time that Bush is called upon to do that duty -- and most of them would be better at ad libbing their way through a press conference as well.

(American Hero, incidentally, is the book that the film Wag The Dog was loosely based on.)