Better Presidents (than the one we’ve got)

Remember the days when the American Presidency was honorable? When the white man in charge of the rest of us was a symbol of heroism, strength, grand-fatherhood, power and hope? He was the American Dream personified; a symbolic pillar of our nation’s pride, wealth, freedom and justice. Remember? Well, neither do we, but we do seem to recall such references being made to our past Presidents’ noble statures in our ratty, broken-binding Public School history textbooks – the ones that covered current American History all the way up to the fine and memorable presidency of William Taft.

Patriotism lives in our heart of hearts, after all. And in honor of what the US Presidency should be, or at least, should aspire to be, here is a list of fictional film Presidents who, for all their faults, are still better than our current White House Resident-Evil.

The American President – President Andrew Shepherd’s major flaw is horniness. Lonely widower wants to make time with a hotty environmental lobbyist. And what’s wrong with that? Well, Americans like their Presidents either in sexless marriages or completely virginal, for one, and opposition Senator Rumsom really knows how to hit below the belt. He attacks the Prez on the grounds of moral corruption, and the lady on the ground of “Grand Slut-itude” with the usual right-wing flourish for keeping sex in the headlines and on the minds of the very American People who claim to abhor it. But President Shepherd knows there’s what’s right and there’s what’s right, and sticking up for his lady rather than siding with the Phantom Moral American Electorate, despite his poll numbers, makes him the bigger man in the end.

Air Force One – It’s fairly hard to find any weakness in Harrison Ford’s portrayal of the ass-kicking President James Marshall, save one, and it’s a big one: He NEGOTIATES WITH THE TERRORISTS!! The first rule of American Presidenting, the very first thing they teach in Presidenting 101, is that, We the American People NEVER Negotiate with Terrorists. Unfortunately, President Marshall breaks that rule here when under duress, to save his daughter’s life. Huh. But do we hold that against him, when looking upon his administration’s legacy within the historical context of the film? No, because he made up for it in spades by kicking ass in major ways, killing the bad guys, the bad guys helpers, and saving the day.

Dave – This guy really puts our current “leader” to shame. He is everything that W claims to be, just a normal, beer-drinking kind of guy with a no-nonsense view of the world, and simplistic solutions to complex policy problems. The difference? Dave actually solves the problems, explains the issues with clever antidotes, and gets his cabinet to agree to self-explanatory, meaningful budget cuts for the greater good of furthering actual policy. We suspect the fact that Dave has a 5^th grader’s command of the English language is giving him a bit of a unfair advantage when in direct comparison to George, so maybe we are bit being a bit unfairly biased here. But P.S., he's not even really the president, and he still does a better job.

Idiocracy – There is no better way to describe the smack-down awesomeness of President Camacho than as evidenced by his State of the Union speech: “Shit. I know shit's bad right now, with all that starving bullshit. I understand everyone's shit's emotional right now.” He knows how to sway a crowd, speak moronically to the masses, pass blame around a room and make plenty of empty promises. Well then, how is he better than Bush you might ask? Simple. He admits when he is wrong. He may have condemned Secretary of the Interior Not Sure to death for failure to fix “all the shit’s that’s fucked up,” but when he finds out that Not Sure in fact, DID fix up all that shit, he stopped the public execution by Extreme Monster Truck Elimination. Now that’s the kind of president we want in our corner. Ding!

Conclusion: Needless to say, there is hardly anything earth shattering being stated here. At this point, anyone, from the idealistically- portrayed, Hollywood movie characters, all the way down the line to that guy outside our office eating the last quarter of week-old burrito from a trash can, would do a better job than our W.

Only 17 months to go…