The other night a few drinks and some morbid curiosity led me to watch Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner’s The American President, a piece of mid-90s political porn about a President who gets a girlfriend. I’ve embedded the climactic scene above, and I think it’s the answer to the question of what Joe Klein wants in a President.
To make a long and tedious story as short as possible, President Michael Douglas is trying to push through his crime bill by compromising away the assault weapons portion, while supposedly hard-nosed political operative Annette Bening, who has been hired to butch up an environmental organization, wants to push through a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases. When Douglas lets Bening sleep over at the White House, social conservative Richard Dreyfuss makes their relationship a campaign issue. This leads Douglas to wuss out on a deal he made with Bening to push for her bill, so she dumps him.
After much breathless blah blah blah, the President strides into a press conference, laces into Dreyfuss, and says he’s going to re-introduce the crime bill with real gun control while simultaneously pushing for the environmental bill. The movie ends in a rosy glow before we can watch both pieces of legislation go down to miserable failure because 535 members of Congress aren’t swayed by some podium pounding by our square-jawed hero.
I’d say that this kind of West Wing drama is exactly what Joe Klein and all the other political connoisseurs want from a President. Lots of noble words accompanied by noble failure. In addition to being worldly, dirty and un-presidential, messy compromises just can’t be tied up in two hours, so they cut into lazy pundits’ TV and cocktail time.
And while we’re taking a trip down memory lane, let’s not forget that Klein spent the mid-90s writing his own fantasy piece about presidential politics, and lying about his authorship.