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Saturday, June 02, 2007
A president named Fred?
Lance Manion (is that a 70s TV tough guy name or what?) has a great piece on why Fred Thompson should not be taken seriously as a presidential candidate:
The Mo Dowd Approved knock on Hillary is she is ambitious. She shouldn't be President because she wants to be President. Don't they all?
Well, sure. But Hillary wants it too much. How can we tell she wants it too much? Why, she's actually worked hard all her adult life to be qualified and competent to do the job.
By that standard, if working for the job is a sign you don't deserve it, then not working at all for it must be proof that you should have it and therefore Fred Thompson is the candidate, of either party, who has most earned the job by doing nothing to earn it.
Since he left the Senate, after a single term, Thompson has half-assedly pursued a second-rate acting career and diligently piled up big bucks as a lobbyist.
Ah, but while all the other candidates were busy working at being United States Senators or mayor of the most important city in the nation, or at serving as governors of out of the way backwaters like Massachusetts and New Mexico, Arkansas and Wisconsin, or at founding and running their own organizations for political and economic change, Fred Thompson was doing the more important work of building an image as a movie tough guy.
And image is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know when you walk into the voting booth, at least as far as the beautiful minds of our elite Press Corps are concerned.
Fred Thompson is a tough guy, declares Newsweek's Howard Fineman, as if being a tough guy was the qualification for President of the United States as opposed to the leader of a street gang. How do we know he's tough? Why, says Time's Mark Helperin, we know Thompson's tough because he's played so many tough guys well on TV and in the movies.
This is what it takes to be President, according to one of the most influential journalists in America: The ability to be passively accepted in a part someone else has written for you, someone else has directed your performance in, someone else has dressed you for, someone else has photographed to make you look like what you're playing, and someone else has edited to make sure only the very best of what you said and did makes it onto the screen, proves you are what you appeared to be and that then qualifies you to be President of the United States.
The rest of the post that continues along the lines of "why the political media sucks" is well worth reading, too.
Labels: Fred Thompson, media, politics
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