W: A Second-Rate Dutch, Or Is There Such A Thing As A C-Picture Actor?

The orgiastic celebration of Reagan's presidency is at an end (at last). Now, poor W is on his own again. The news from Iraq (and now Saudi Arabia) just gets worse and worse. The most dangerous road in Iraq is the freeway from downtown to the airport. If this is (fair & balanced) disillusionment, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double
by FRANK RICH


"BOY, if life were only like this," says Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" after he brings out the actual Marshall McLuhan to silence a pontificating McLuhan expert with whom he's trapped on a movie line. Well, last weekend life was like that.

George W. Bush was all suited up in Normandy to repeat Ronald Reagan's 1984 blockbuster elegy to "the boys of Pointe du Hoc" (screenplay by Peggy Noonan). It was not the first time that the current president had taken a page from his fabled predecessor's script, but it may have been the most humiliating. The D-Day-eve timing of Reagan's death had pushed the replay of his original oration to center stage on TV, much as the real McLuhan is yanked on screen in "Annie Hall." And as the McLuhan wannabe soon slinks away in that movie, so Mr. Bush's would-be Reaganesque speech atomized into white noise, to the limited extent that it was broadcast at all.

Some would argue that no politician in his right mind would even invite comparisons to the Great Communicator. In the aftermath of Reagan's death, his fans and foes alike remain agog at his performance chops. Kennedy may have brought the Rat Pack to the White House, but no one has ever arrived there with Reagan's particular gifts as an entertainer. They were a product of training, not accident. He had first performed as a child in church skits put on by his mother. Later came the legendary path through baseball announcing, 52 feature films, "General Electric Theater" and the conservative speaking circuit, where he honed what became known as the Speech. Not even other Hollywood-spawned politicians, whether George Murphy before him or Arnold Schwarzenegger after, can match this résumé. To see the difference between an acting professional and an aspiring amateur, just look at the one recent president who had show business on the brain, Bill Clinton. Though Mr. Clinton's act may be better than any Reagan successor, he nonetheless lacks the master's disciplined ability to hit his mark, not to mention his timing, ready wit and brevity.

Mr. Clinton went so far as to incongruously appropriate Reagan ideology ("The era of big government is over") for political expediency. But no one has more strenuously tried to emulate the 40th president in both style and substance than George W. Bush. Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I don't know how you miss them." Yes, the parallels are there — hammered in by Mr. Bush's packagers so we can never miss them. But Karl Rove and company may have overplayed their hand. The orgiastic celebration of Reagan's presidency over the past week, an upbeat Hollywood epic that has glided past Iran-contra, Bitburg and the retreat from Lebanon with impressive ease, has brought into clear focus the size of the gap between the two men. To say that difference in stature is merely a function of an actor's practiced skill at performance is both to understate the character of Ronald Reagan and to impugn the art of acting.

The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook have been nothing if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's crew famously would have Reagan cut ribbons in front of nursing homes even as he cut funds for their construction, so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time his administration takes a whack at the environment. To pass himself off as a practiced hand at proletarian manual labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on camera at his ranch in Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara. In Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an "axis of evil" with the "evil empire."

Even his personality is presented to the public as a clone of Reagan's. Mr. Bush is always characterized by his associates as a "big picture" guy who leaves any detail that can't be fit on a 3-by-5 card to his aides. As Donald Rumsfeld says in Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack": "This president has a lot of the same quality that Ronald Reagan did where he'd look out, way out to the horizon and plant a standard out there and then point toward it."

To some who admire both men, the analogy is plausible. Mr. Bush's certitude about his war on terrorism matches Reagan's unyielding anti-communism. Both presidents made a religion out of big tax cuts, talked of curbing government even as they increased spending and then serenely ignored the daunting deficits that ensued.

Those who dislike both men see less salutary parallels. Both presidents tried every stunt imaginable to create the illusion that their wartime service had not been confined to the home front. Both pandered to the religious right by impeding urgently needed federal medical research that would have saved lives (Reagan with AIDS, Mr. Bush with stem cells). Where Bush and Reagan boosters see both men as refreshingly disdainful of intellectuals, critics see a smug lack of curiosity in any ideas but their own. The ur-text of today's profuse Bushisms can be found in such Reaganisms as his remarks upon returning from a trip to South America: "Well, I learned a lot. . . . You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries." Both presidents inspired "Tonight Show" gags about their endless vacations.

But whether one likes either president or not, the difference between them remains far greater than any similarities, and that difference has more ramifications during a hot war than a cold one. Reagan may have been an actor, but in Garry Wills's famous phrase, he played "the heartwarming role of himself." Though he never studied with Lee Strasberg, he practiced the method; his performance was based, however loosely, on the emotional memory of a difficult youth as the son of an itinerant, sometimes unemployed alcoholic. That Reagan triumphed over this background during the Depression, developing the considerable ambition needed to work his way through college and eventually to Warner Brothers, informed the sentimental optimism that both defined (and limited) his vision of America as a place where perseverance could pay off for anyone. It was indeed the heartwarming role of himself (with the New Deal backdrop of his own biography eventually stripped out).

Yet there was more to Reagan's role than its Horatio Alger success story. Reagan may have stayed in Culver City during the war, but as a teenage riverfront lifeguard in Illinois, he rescued 77 people, demonstrating early on the physical courage that would see him through an assassination attempt. And for all Reagan's absorption in show business, he was always engaged in politics (to the point of alienating his first wife, Jane Wyman, who found his preoccupation a bore). As president of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 40's, he was at the center of fierce labor and blacklisting battles.

Nor was he wholly isolated from the America beyond Hollywood. A contract player who became "Errol Flynn of the B's," he wasn't a big enough star to merit all the perquisites of top show-biz royalty. As his movie career dwindled in the early 50's, he was briefly reduced to serving (at age 42) as the baggy-pants M.C. to a cheesy, showgirl-laden revue at the Last Frontier casino on the Vegas strip. Once he was reborn as a G.E. spokesman, he spent years meeting workers in the company factories that he repeatedly toured when off camera.

Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr. Reagan would give as president, it derived from this earlier immersion in the real world. The script he used in the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly demonization of a "welfare queen") and preached family values he didn't practice with his own often-estranged children. But even the fiction was adapted from experience. While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid of a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there had been decades when he lived in an America broader than that of Justin Dart and Alfred Bloomingdale.

Mr. Bush's aw-shucks persona, by contrast, has been manufactured from scratch. He has rarely, if ever, ventured out of the cocoon of privilege. He "lost a lot of other people's money in the oil business," said Ron Reagan Jr. in 2000. "What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?" While the young Ronald Reagan used his imagination to improvise play-by-play radio accounts of baseball games based on sparse telegraphic accounts, Mr. Bush made a killing on a baseball team with the help of cronies and sweetheart deals. He has no history of engagement with either issues or people beyond big oil or the Andover-Yale-Harvard orbit until he belatedly went into the family business of politics.

He does the down-home accent well, and he dresses the part. In the new issue of The Atlantic, a linguist hypothesizes to James Fallows that Mr. Bush, a smoother speaker in his Texas political career than now, may have "deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne" since then "as a way of showing deep-down Nascar-type manliness." It's as if he's eradicating his patrician one-term father to adopt the two-term Gipper as his dad instead. But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts to affect a jus' folks geniality are invariably betrayed by nastiness whenever someone threatens to keep him from getting his own way. It's impossible to imagine Reagan countenancing the impugning of the patriotism of war heroes like John McCain and Max Cleland as the Bush machine has done in the heat of close campaigns.

Last weekend in Normandy, the president sat for an interview in which Tom Brokaw challenged his efforts to pull off a bigger flimflam than impersonating Ronald Reagan — the conflation of the Iraq war with World War II. "You referred to the `ruthless and treacherous surprise attack on America' that we went through during our time," Mr. Brokaw said. "But that wasn't Iraq who did that, that was al Qaeda." With the gravesites of the World War II dead behind him, the president retreated to his familiar script ("Iraq is a part of the war on terror"). Even if you think the lines make sense, the irritated man delivering them did not sound like someone who had ever experienced pain of the life-and-death intensity that comes with war. The problem is not merely that Mr. Bush lacks Reagan's lilting vocal delivery. As any professional actor can tell you, no performance, however sonorous, can be credible if it doesn't contain at least a kernel of emotional truth.

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company