What is the relationship between a debate and running a country? That should be the question on everyone's minds today.
Bush looked like someone who had just tasted a caraway seed for the first time during most of Kerry's responses, and Kerry looked like the guy who always had the answer in math class. Kerry was very good. If I was casting the role of president, he would be a strong choice. When you think about it, who do you want to cast for the role of president, assuming he would be just following a script handed to him hours or minutes before each scene?
Most people would vote for their dad. Many people would vote for good teachers or strong captains of sports teams they had played on. Many others would vote for Captain Kirk or George Washington or Hercules...mythical figures far removed from the imperfect men they had known in real life.
What about women? Do strong women governors like Ann Richards or strong women senators like Barbara Boxer fit the imago of a National Leader?
I don't think so...but not because they are women. The Senate is a school yard brawl for people with hair helmets. Governorship is like Junior Woodchuck politics...it rises above the parochial inanity of city Bosses, but not high enough to shed its reek of graft, compromise, opportunism, and accident. At the national level we want someone who wears a cape and has no genitals. Someone who has never had a pimple on their butt or stolen a candy bar. We want a president who doesn't scratch themself or call their spouse profane names in the heat of an argument.
If we wanted to cast a woman, she should look like Judy Dench and talk like a 40 year old Katherine Hepburn. Maybe there is someone in the ranks that fits that description. If you know of them, send me email.
The presidency is a figurative role. It rises above the scuffed shoes and broken nails of actual daily life. George Bush Senior hadn't been in a grocery store for 15 years when he went campaigning against Clinton in 92. Bill Clinton hadn't ended a sentence in a preposition since 7th grade.
Kerry was bright, warm, mellow and well paced as a good single malt scotch whiskey. Bush was small, dogged, disarmingly personal and impossibly blind to the details...the beer and schnapps candidate. Kerry calmed down as Bush got more antsy, and he found the presence of mind to pause meaningfully, end his sentences crisply, no matter how much heat burned beneath the surface of his carefully chosen words. Bush's face was the pretentious restaurant's streetside window...inside everything was overdone and the price wasn't mentioned, while outside the muggings and traffic snarls revealed the true mood of the moment.
So what does debating have to do with National Leadership? We don't know. We hope that there is more to the Presidency than a mere figurehead, a carved wooden decoy hiding the men with their guns in the marsh grass. We hope the president can actually choose a domestic and foreign policy, and that his choices aren't limited to the dictates of a curtained cabal. But we aren't sure anymore.
Who looks like a president? Who talks like a president? Where are the Roosevelts, who tempered their patrician presence with the common man's welfare concerns? Where are the Kennedy's who hid their crippling pain behind an urbane, sexy confidence? The only thing common about Kerry is the spelling of his name. The only thing urbane about Bush is the polish on his shoes when he comes out from behind the lectern.
One commentator said Bush talked to us and Kerry lectured us. That doesn't cut it, really. Bush's folksy vocabulary is constantly belied by the desperate tension in his eyes, the alarming silences between subject and predicate when he must reach so deeply into his programming to find the "know" that follows his sputtered "I." And Kerry is just as programmed. He hasn't had a spontaneous moment untainted by opportunity since he was a virgin. Neither candidate is folk. And they want to wear a suit sewn from the cloth of folklore.
Nobody won last night's debate. We are adrift, in America, in a sea of knowledge and opinion. There is no shore in sight. There is no guide star visible in the darkness that descends upon us.
The neocons are reducing all citizens to two dimensional puzzle pieces that they can move at will. The liberals retreat into their vestigal privelege of culture and education and scorn the very energy that could save their myth of a heart-felt politics.
And in the meantime, we know, like Bush, that war and politics are a hard job. We know because the television showed us.
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