American Politics Journal

The Cheshire President
"Bang! He went out like a light!"
By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 4, 2001 (APJP) -- Putsch was giving a speech. CNN, always willing to help sell the surrogate-in-chief to the American public, was covering the speech.

So far, so normal. Putsch babbles, and CNN positions the cameras at angles where the strings won't show. Just another day in Corporate America.

But then the word came in: the Big Dog was opening his office in Harlem.

Propping up the Faux-President is on thing, but ratings are ratings. William Jefferson Clinton, the most popular politician in America and America's last elected President, the Big Dog, translates to ratings.

CNN broke away from Putsch's speech, literally in mid syllable, and went to Harlem.

(I suspect that when the far-right coalition blows apart into hundreds of discrete factions, viciously fighting one another as they all go down together like sparks from an air-burst firecracker, it won't be because of disagreements over issues, or fruitcake fundamentalist quarrels over minutiae in the Bible, but it will be good old greed that does them in.)

CNN adores Putsch, and in their overblown, pompous way, try to pass him off as a competent and capable world leader every chance they get. After all, that attracts those sorts of advertisers willing to pay the premium rates, the brokerage houses and the pharmaceuticals, the insurance companies and the Wall Street Journal. Putsch's crowd.

But ratings are what makes it possible for CNN to exact huge amounts from these reactionary children of privilege, and so they dropped Putsch like a wet cat and trained their cameras in on Clinton.

It made sense. Clinton has Presence of a sort not seen since FDR. He has his own big confident grin, his own sense of personal power, the same ability to draw people in. Putsch has all the charisma of a minor functionary at the department of motor vehicles, the guy who tells you to look straight at the camera and always makes you look like a failed embalming job in the picture.

The people know this, too; even as Zogby reports Putsch's job-approval numbers moving into negative territory, another poll reports that by a 48-38 margin, people would sooner see Clinton as President.

Go get your phone book. Open it at random, without looking at the pages. Now, stab a finger at it. Look to see where your finger landed. I would sooner see that person as President than Putsch. Chances are you agree.

That poll was damning Clinton with faint praise. Cutting into the inchoate mumbling of "el leader" to show Clinton addressing the people of Harlem was as inevitable as breaking away from a rerun of "The Odd Couple" to announce that the Second Coming had just occurred.

When you have the undisputed master of American politics waiting to charm the socks off your viewers (and sponsors, even though they'll die before admitting it), you don't sit around filming some unpopular functionary who is talking about making the pie higher and asking is our children learning.

I suspect that as time goes on, we're going to be seeing less and less of fearless leader.

His handlers already know that he's a moron who can't be trusted to speak off-the-cuff. Even in informal settings where things are relaxed and informal, a situation where most politicians excel, Putsch manages to sound like a moron. The routine about giving an oration at the Roman Coliseum (reminding people that he was no orator) was probably the last straw. Perhaps they can have a chopper nearby, ready to start up whenever a reporter asks an awkward question like, "Mr. President, how many states are in the union?". It worked for Reagan.

The media are beginning to realize that he's a ratings drain. He's boring when he talks, frightening when he doesn't. Besides, the media has a bunch of scandals to play with: there's the right wing mayor who's up on serial child-molestation charges, there's the right wing congressman who had a dead intern appear in his office on Monday morning, and there's the right wing congressman who was acquainted with an intern who is now missing.

Scratching your head and wondering why you haven't heard about the first two? Here's a hint: they are Republicans. In the eyes of corporate media, Republicans are above our foolish laws, our silly morals. We don't need to hear about those scandals.

But even if two out of three scandals are unreportable due to political inexpediency, they have one big juicy one they can run into the ground.

From their perspective, it's better than having to strain to ignore Putsch's plans to rape the national forests and the arctic wilderness, And the media can't report his stumbles and scandals. He's a Republican. More and more, people are noticing that the media is heavily biased to the right, and trying to prop up Putsch as a good example of an American president while pretending to have journalistic integrity is a non-starter.

There's also the problem of the economy: it's going south. Greenspan has lowered interest rates six times, and is running out of operating room. Japan is diving deeper into their decade-long recession, and taking what used to be called the "Paper Tigers" -- the rest of Asia outside of China -- with them. Europe is suffering from a downturn. Free trade doesn't seem to be preventing a global recession.

Putsch's tax rebate -- actually a Democratic idea tacked on to Putsch's "feed the rich" scam -- isn't going to have much effect. It's some $37 billion dollars, spread out over two months. That sounds like a lot of money until you realize that in an eight trillion dollar economy, that represents a maximum increase of two tenths of one percent in economic activity. And now the Pubs are admitting that they'll have to start borrowing to pay for it; between the profligate giveaways and the lack of revenue in a slowing economy, the surplus vanished.

It's a political truism that the president gets blamed for bad economies, credit for good ones. Whether he had anything to do with it or not. Putsch spent the first few months trying to talk down the economy to justify his tax scam, and while it's problematic whether his notes of doom actually had any effect on the market, people will remember that he tried to sabotage the American economy for political gain, and the economy is now messed up.

All these reasons would be enough for Putsch's handlers to decide to have him lie low. Even he has been showing the strain, making noises about wanting to go back to Crawford, and muttering about how much simpler it would be if America was a dictatorship. But there's an increasing chance that a major regional conflict will erupt in the middle east, and in Yugoslavia. Both represent catastrophic and willful failures in foreign policy by Putsch, and stand in stark contrast to Clinton, who was at least able to staunch the flow of blood in those regions.

So the Republicans don't want people looking at Putsch as things rapidly worsen, don't want him compared to the Big Dog, and know he'll never be another comeback kid. All they can do is keep him squirreled away, and bring him out to greet girl scouts and salute Memorial Day parades and smile at the cameras.

Six months into his term, and he's already a lame duck.

It doesn't make the people who are supporting him any less dangerous. It just means we can all stop pretending he matters.