The One and Only
PODHORETZ, JOHN
The One and Only Barack Obama won’t need special effects to walk on water. BY JOHN PODHORETZ George M. Cohan, the songanddance man, is invited to the Oval Offi ce by Franklin D....
...This led the writer-producer Gary David Goldberg to liken his populist interlocutor to “Anthony Perkins playing Fidel Castro on acid...
...That would be a betrayal of hope, of change...
...Never have fi ctional presidents been given such glowing treatment as Morgan Freeman’s in the asteroid movie Deep Impact and Dennis Haysbert’s on the television series 24...
...There will be television series and movies about group houses fi lled with anorexic models playing House, Senate, and White House staffers, falling in like and in love and in sorrow, all residing within the becalmed shadow of the White House’s master, who will look upon them and make it known to them that he is well pleased...
...Carville told Maureen Dowd that “they started telling me how many degrees they had...
...Somebody blurted out, ‘I have a Ph.D...
...Once again, as was true when Clinton came to offi ce, the evil city of coal-hearted pols will be wondrously transmuted into a sunny place populated by young, dreamy idealists who only want to make the world a better place...
...He is, after all, The One, as Oprah Winfrey, perhaps the most powerful person in show business, declared him...
...The effect is to raise FDR’s status to that of a divinity, the Hollywood equivalent of the Lord telling Moses: “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live . . . thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen...
...But Obama is real, not fi ctional, and any effort to mimic or mime him, or even to offer a fi ctionalized representation of him in the form of a black president comparable to him, might seem disrespectful to those in Hollywood who are ready to serve him, bathe him, and anoint him with oil...
...He is an old man, and thrilled beyond words to discover his president is a fan...
...Bill Clinton might have gotten such treatment, but as his administration began in 1993, a delegation of Hollywood potentates visited James Carville in the White House to give him their advice and counsel on what their beloved new president must do...
...We hear his voice, but he is photographed from the back, from the side, over his shoulder...
...FDR asks Cohan to tell him the story of his life, and thus begins Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney’s glorious 1942 musical...
...Not only is Obama already a fi gure of worship, he easily fi ts an already established Hollywood model: the calm and benevolent black governmental authority fi gure...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Their high-handed and astoundingly na?ve and foolish advice on health care so enraged Carville that he began to scream at them...
...I suspect the treatment of Barack Obama in Hollywood will follow along the lines of this model...
...Over the past 20 years there has hardly been a courtroom scene in which an African American is not the wise presiding judge...
...Expressing dissatisfaction with a black leader...
...The face of the actor who plays Roosevelt is obscured...
...The election of Obama will have one other effect on Hollywood...
...Even if Barack Obama proves to be a disappointment to Hollywood, it simply will not have the vocabulary to translate him into something more along the lines of what they would prefer, as they did with Clinton...
...And in The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin took the sloppy but politically prudent Clinton, put him in a washing machine, pulled him out, and ironed him fl at into the fl awless and always principled Jed Bartlet...
...in communications from U.C.L.A.’ Well, wowee-kazowee...
...In the former, Clinton is a popular chief executive who is afraid to do what is right (meaning what is left) until he falls in love with an environmentalist who sets him straight...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ George M. Cohan, the songanddance man, is invited to the Oval Offi ce by Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Clinton’s relationship with Hollywood never quite recovered from that: The injured sense among the assembled that the new young president they so wanted to love would allow them to be abused by this . . . Louisianan . . . led directly to the ambiguous portrait of Clinton offered in the fi lm The American President and the television show The West Wing...
...But he will never be seen...
...Among presidents in the past century, only one other—John F. Kennedy—has received such unambiguously worshipful treatment from Hollywood—and that was only after he was dead...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 9
