EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first story in "The Measure of a Nation," a yearlong series of multimedia story packages about the American presidency and the 2008 elections as seen through the prism of the culture, not the candidates.
Associated Press
The president of the United States stands at the lectern in the American Capitol, facing us all -- Congress, the Cabinet, a television audience of millions. He struggles for the right words to restore the public's faith in his office.
A nation awaits. Will he resign? Will he implicate others? Will he act as the leader of the planet's most powerful country should?
"There are," he begins, "certain things you should expect from your president."
Since the moment in 1789 when a Revolutionary War hero named George Washington recited a 35-word oath, Americans have expected certain things from their presidents. For good reason: In a society that has mythologized itself from its earliest days, the president is the high priest of the national identity.
For 219 years, the institution has become burdened with legend, and the expectations exceed the grasp of any mortal. Americans' notions of the presidency come from cultural cues we've been conditioned to notice -- from the traits of past presidents, from novels, TV and movies and spin artists who predate the telegraph and the photograph.
From ourselves.
That president standing before Congress and telling the nation about expectations is Dave Kovic, the regular-guy doppelganger who accidentally sits in for patrician President Bill Mitchell in the 1993 movie Dave .
Kovic, played by Kevin Kline, continues: "I ought to care more about you than I do about me. I ought to care more about what's right than I do about what's popular. I ought to be willing to give up this whole thing for something I believe in. Because if I'm not, then maybe I don't belong here in the first place."
In 2008, once again, Americans must decide who belongs in the White House. It is one of the most pivotal elections of our age. But ours is an era of unparalleled information, and it is also one of deep confusion, and we see our presidents through a foggy prism of expectation and paradox.
We seek cowboy and pioneer, handyman and orator, statue and loving parent -- all wrapped up in the tailored suit of a CEO.
So before the ballot, some questions:
How did this office become such a repository of everything we want to be? More important, how does this potent mix of myths and realities help us elevate the next leader of the American secular faith?
You think the presidency is about politics? Sorry. It's the values. No wonder we expect so much. No wonder that, in the end, we're usually disappointed.
Dave's fictional oratory rings true -- truer, really, than reality. Though its details might be concocted, the mythology is an authentic reflection of what we seek and expect.
Because in America, land of big stories, the power of myths is real.
"HONEST ABE is the first thing that comes to mind -- he was known for his honesty." So says Rebecca Schmidt, who lives in the town where Abraham Lincoln practiced law, reared his family and ran for president. Her comment suggests something intriguing: Even in Springfield, where Lincoln facts are everywhere, Lincoln myths are potent.
Ms. Schmidt and friend Randi Clausen have just emerged from the house where Lincoln lived from 1844 until he left for the White House in 1861. In Springfield, the capital of the state that bills itself as the Land of Lincoln, these tours, places and icons make up the economic and cultural fabric -- from the tomb north of town to the recently shuttered El Presidente Burritos a few doors down from his law office.
Here, expectations rival -- or even overshadow -- reality. The transaction between fact and parable blurs.
"Lincoln became a legend," artist Jay William Thomas says in a film at the city's Disney-influenced Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum. "And that's the problem. We haven't seen him clearly since."
For every dispassionate debunking such as, "A lot of people don't realize he didn't go out of the log cabin and straight into the White House" (Susan Haake, the curator of Lincoln's house), there's a counterbalance of romantic grandiosity such as, "Fortunately for us, his dreams were not as small as that log cabin was" (historical interpreter Jason Collins, who gives tours of the place).
Both are necessary in Springfield, and both are necessary in the myth of the presidency.
Making myths from raw material has always been part of the national character. In America, reality is retrofitted to match the values we hold dear and the people we wish to be. It took more than 1,000 years to spread Christ's gospel far and wide; the American presidency did it in 200.
GREAT SCREEN PRESIDENTS
Here are five great - or, at least, provocative - depictions of the American presidency immortalized on screens large and small. No matter if they really existed.
JACK STANTON
Primary Colors (1998)
- John Travolta plays the Bill Clinton doppelganger candidate with a calibrated empathy and Shakespearean-size flaws. Most fascinating is how Stanton, a high-functioning train wreck with an outsized personality, connects with people through studied intimacy but also drives them away with hypocrisy.
BILL MITCHELL
Dave (1993)
- Well-intentioned but schlumpy Dave Kovic gets caught up in a series of events that cause him to step in and replace his look-alike -- Bill Mitchell, the incapacitated president. In the weeks that follow, as he fools the American people, Kovic turns the austere and callous Mitchell into an ethical, I-feel-your-pain chief executive.
BOBBY KENNEDY
Bobby (2006)
- No, RFK never made it to the White House, but this fictional chronicle of the people around the Ambassador Hotel in the hours before his 1968 assassination is one of the best films around. Though Kennedy makes only brief appearances, the expectations of what he could bring to the presidency brings into focus what Americans want from a leader.
JED BARTLET
The West Wing (1999-07)
- Who could ask for a better role model than President Josiah Bartlet, of New Hampshire, as portrayed by Martin Sheen. Though he was cast as a pragmatic, liberal idealist, almost any American of any political stripe could find something to like in Mr. Sheen's iconic portrayal of America itself embodied in one man.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
- Henry Fonda's portrayal of the Great Emancipator's earlier years is one of the basic texts of the modern Lincoln myth -- filled with pastoral music, rail splitting, "I reckon" talk and county-fair pie judging. This one movie contains so much American presidential mythology that viewing it should be part of the citizenship test.
THE FRANKENSTEIN PRESIDENT
A bit of inspirational vision from Thomas Jefferson. A dose of national supremacy from James Monroe. Theodore Roosevelt's bully pulpit, Ronald Reagan's folksy charm and Bill Clinton's empathy. Add it all up and what have you got? The ultimate president. Of course, there's no such thing as a perfect chief executive, but that doesn't stop Americans from looking for one in the bits and pieces of presidents past. A Frankenstein president might look like this:
HONESTY: George Washington didn't chop down the cherry tree, but he was an honorable man. Mason Locke Weems made up the story as a parable of the larger truth.
CHARM: John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, oozed youthful charm and good looks in the early 1960s. They invited musicians, poets, actors and athletes to visit the White House, where the arts and culture were celebrated and children often could be seen playing. Bill Clinton emulated some of this during his 1993-2001 administration.
POPULISM: Andrew Jackson's exploited his humble upbringing (he was the first president born in a log cabin), his history of dueling (he killed a man in 1806 and lived the rest of his life with a bullet lodged near his heart) and his war record (he was the only president to serve in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812) to brand himself the champion of the common man. At his inaugural, the corncob pipe-smoking Jackson opened the White House to his rowdy supporters, who trashed the place.
CUNNING: Abraham Lincoln was in many ways the nation's first media politician. In 1832, he introduced himself to the political world through the columns of a community newspaper. He personally edited newspaper transcripts of his most famous speech, reinserting the famous phrase "A house divided against itself cannot stand" and other sentences over editors' objections. As president, he allowed the news media access like never before.
METTLE: Theodore Roosevelt was a cowboy, big-game hunter, athlete, outdoorsman and explorer who noted, in 1910, that it's not the critic who counts. "The credit," he said, "belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds."
PROTECTOR: Teddy's cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, led the nation out of the Great Depression and into World War II, saying that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Mr. Reagan, too, exuded a fatherliness that many found appealing in a president.
AMBITION: Americans embraced James K. Polk's notion of "Manifest Destiny," an ideology that held that it was the destiny of the United States to expand its territory to the Pacific Ocean and spread the blessings of liberty.
SPIRITUALITY: Democrat Jimmy Carter might have been the nation's first evangelical president. President George W. Bush called Jesus his favorite philosopher.
AUTHENTICITY: Harry Truman took long walks in public near the White House, which he called the "Great White Jail," and never seemed to lose touch with his Missouri roots.
DECISIVENESS: President George W. Bush persuaded wary voters to back his re-election bid despite concerns about the war in Iraq.
-- Associated Press
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