The American President

Abstract

At the end of the nineties decade, only months before the demise of the two-term Clinton presidency, Neal Gabler described what the American presidency had become under the influence of the spin that Bill and Hillary Clinton and Kenneth Starr, assisted by an accommodating American media, created. First describing how Lee Atwater (as campaign manager for the elder Bush whose son would succeed the Clintons as a result of the contested 2000 election) commissioned Clotaire Rapaille, a medical anthropologist, to hold therapy sessions with groups of voters to analyze their most primal associations with the American presidency, Gabler goes on to write, “What he [Rapaille] discovered is that Americans see their president as a kind of ‘movie character’ whose primary function is to provide ‘cheap entertainment’ for the country…. But the idea that the office of the presidency would become a provender of entertainment, the idea that one of the president’s key functions would be to provide the public with a few voyeuristic thrills is a relatively new phenomenon.”¹

In a year when post election quibbling reduced our respect for politics to the size of a solitary chad, the Oval Office ironically proved to be an inspiring ground for entertainers. From comics aping real presidents, to an actor conjuring a fictional one, to a standing President playing himself, it’s impossible to single out one performer-in-chief.

—Neil Gabler, “The Year That Was,” Entertainment Weekly