Give me strength. The Republicans want another actor to run for office. Will we never learn? We’ve already had Reagan, the star of Bedtime for Bonzo. We’ve now got Arnold, the star of Junior and Kindergarten Cop. And this time the guy running for the top spot is 65-year-old actor-politician Fred Thompson, who supplies his customary Southern-fried grits-gravel-and-gravitas to the role of District Attorney Arthur Branch on Dick Wolf’s humourless legal-procedural TV show Law & Order. And incredibly, though Thompson has yet to announce his candidacy, he now regularly polls among the favourites in a veritable knaves’ gallery of Republican aspirants, none of whom entirely satisfies the mad, molten “Grand Old Party” base.
A former two-term Tennessee senator (with a prior history of lobbying for arms dealers), Thompson left no discernible legislative traces behind him in the US Congress but damn it, he looks the part. And because of that — a mere resemblance — Washington has gone nuts. Isn’t this how republics are supposed to die?
Fred looks so good, in fact, to the official, permanent Washington establishment and its courtier caste that this week Sally Quinn, wife of former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, wrote in the Post that Thompson should replace the formidable Dick Cheney as vice-president. Imagine if you will a veep like Cheney, who resembles politician Martin Sheen in Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (“Hallelujah gentlemen, the missiles are flying!”), being replaced by a lazy, undistinguished man as randomly selected and as temperamentally unsuited to the role of president as Kevin Kline was in Dave, another cipher chosen for the simple expedient of “looking like” a president.
Fred’s long march to his unlikely candidacy follows a snaking route through decades of the most bizarre intermingling of real and fictional narratives. Back when Bradlee’s newspaper was still doing sterling work for the country’s political well-being, Thompson was the Senate Watergate counsel who got Alexander Butterfield to reveal the existence of Nixon’s White House taping system, a nice little walk-on part in history to be reprised endlessly for the campaign commercials next year. After years of lobbying (including for the deregulation of the savings and loan industry, which proved catastrophic), he returned to lawyering in Tennessee. In 1985, when a movie was made of a case he’d been involved in, the director, Roger Spottiswode, asked Fred to play himself. He was a natural. And so began a career in which Thompson brought his patented blend of aw-shucks cornpone homilies and Dixie-fried Southern patter to just about every rung on the order of presidential succession. “When Hollywood directors need someone who can personify governmental power,” wrote the New York Times in 1994, “they often come to him.”
And how: Thompson has played presidents (Last Best Chance), admirals (The Hunt for Red October) and CIA directors (No Way Out), albeit sandwiched between dross like Aces: Iron Eagle III and Curly Sue. In 1992, he played a senator in the ghastly remake of Born Yesterday. By the time it was released in 1993, he was an actual senator, having inherited (by appointment) the seat vacated by incoming vice president Al Gore.
This is how low the US has finally sunk. By this logic we should only select our next leader from among people who’ve played presidents. That would give us a slate like this: Chevy Chase (Jerry Ford), Anthony Hopkins (The Trickster), Michael Gambon (LBJ), Bruce Greenwood (JFK), Kenneth Branagh (FDR) and Alexander Knox (Wilson). Trouble is, less than half of them are American citizens.
So I reluctantly cast my vote for Martin Sheen. Even if the missiles are flying, he’s got to be better than Oedipus Tex. Or Grampa Vader. Or Country Fred. — Â