Commander in Chief
Once upon a time there was a TV show, where the first woman becomes American president after she ascends to the job following the death of the elected president. She resist the pressures to resign, given her total lack of relevant experience and the show goes on to demonstrate how she could still succeed mastering crises of global proportions.
As a review explained:
Hurried out of the cherubic concert and onto Air Force Two, [she] discovers that all the president's men - and his sour-faced attorney general [..] expect her to step aside because [..] does not share the president's conservative agenda. And she almost does resign, until the right-wing speaker of the House, [..] who is next in line to become commander in chief, says something to her about women that is so offensive that she decides she will take the oath of office after all.
Reviewers speculated at the time that the show's intention was to make the idea of Hillary Clinton as President more palatable to the American public. Now that scenario has become more applicable to another figure. Should Palin supporters not be pressing for some reruns?
Another similar plot, maybe not quite as close to a potential reality as above, but just as intriguing, is Christopher Buckley’s Supreme Courtship, (where, quoting from an article on Vanity Fair's site)
the first two candidates for an opening on the Supreme Court of frustrated first-term president have been shown the door by the Senate Judiciary Committee and in a fit of pique, he bypasses the more obvious, worthy candidates for the bench and nominates a cute judge he’s seen on a TV courtroom show. She’s thin on the résumé and void in the experience category. But she’s a looker and a talker.
We've heard many times that in the TV debates, it matters more what image is projected than what was really said. As my intellectual guru, Phillip Adams, once noted: It is almost shocking if you ever dare to just listen to the presidential debates between Nixon and Kennedy. Robbed of the charming imagery, if you actually just listen to the political arguments presented, Nixon outguns Kennedy by a long shot.
So who's fault is it that the electorate has so much become surface over content? I'd suggest you have a look at your newsstand. Overwhelming are the single-lined attention grabbers and they in turn are driven by advertising. Top dollar is paid where an ad can be placed next to the attention grabber, so even the pundit that just scans the papers, but not buying any, will see it. And we have been conditioned to a shorter attention span, so we gravitate towards the one-liners, unable to pick up anything more subtle.
I often wonder what's the hen and what's the egg here. Did our appetite for the stupefying create the modern media or has media lulled our intelligence in order to make our brains more ductile? Obviously, there is some of both. I think, in the end, our willingness to abandon reflective thought to form opinion is much more rooted in the traditional customs of our culture, where we appear unable to resist the temptation of delegating the principal decisions on our worldview to somebody to whom we attribute a higher legitimisation. And is this why, when looking for leaders, we are drawn in by image? Surely, there must be a reason if they just look the part and the fact that we can't comprehend what that reason should be, makes it all more certain that it exists. Whoever has put this candidate in front of us must be in on the secret and since we don't get it, isn't it comforting that they wield the power?
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