The new presidency

John Kerry lost the battle. He also lost the war.

George W Bush won the battle, securing re-election, and yet the Office of the President of the United States has comprehensively changed hands.

I know what you’re thinking. Either you’re thinking I’m a desperate fruit loop, or you’re thinking, “Oh, jeepers. He’s making another of those calculatedly clever-clever points that’ll take the length of a column to unravel.”

Actually, it’s a bit of both.

I repeat: Bush won, and the presidency has changed.

“But … how is this possible?” I hear you scream. “Tell us! Tell us! Stop prevaricating, you maddening tease!”

Well, OK, keep your hair on. I’m getting to it.

See, the change of presidency has taken forty years to evolve. But, like a willowy segment of the human race of which I count myself a crucial part, evolve it has.

The last time a member of the US Senate was elected to the White House, his name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

I knew Jack Kennedy like he was my brother, though he wasn’t. And I know what he’d say now if I’d found a way to interview him for this column. He’d say: “Sure, I got elected. Fat lot of good it did me.”

I’d chuckle, because Jack’d have a point. It’s like I’ve always said about the presidency: you can’t live with it, you can’t live without it.

Take Bill Clinton. Slick Willie can’t work out which is worse: being President or being former-president. Both suck, so to speak.

But the important thing is this: as Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker: “All Kerry needed to become thoroughly presidential was the Presidency.”

Spot on. And yet still Kerry lost.

It is hard to know what to make of the John F Kerry campaign. The guy looked like Abe Lincoln. He spoke perfect presidentese. His manner was all patrician, patriot, president. He’d have eased into the role like a seasoned Hollywood actor. Except that he wasn’t a Hollywood actor. A Hollywood actor would’ve been elected. Kerry was a politician, and it worked against him.

He shouldn’t take it personally. I’ve never been elected president either. After a while, you learn to temper the bitterness. Though I’m not pretending it’s easy.

The fact is no one like JFK II has been elected to the Oval Office since JFK I. The closest example was Bush 41, but he doesn’t count because he was the Gipper’s Veep. Bush 43 is now the norm. Clinton II is the only way the trend might be broken. But Bush 43 is more Clinton I than Bush 41.

The one thing you don’t want to have if you’re running for the White House is Washington experience. Much better to be dog-catcher in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, than have served a couple of decades in the Senate.

As Bush said about his opponent in the second presidential debate: “He’s got a record. He’s been in the Senate twenty years. You can run, but you can’t hide.”

Hidden qualities, and I mean really hidden, are your best hope of winning the presidency.

If Kerry had won, the Office of the President of the United States would’ve looked more like we expect it to look. John F Kerry was the archetypal American president; the Prez who pops up in the movies, begging a superhero to save America (and, if there’s any time left, the World).

John Kerry was the first “presidential” candidate America has actually seen bid for the presidency in many a year.

But the presidency is in danger of no longer being “presidential”. Bush’s appeal rests on his being more dog-catcher than president. “In America, an ideological rebel can build a successful career on the state level”, say John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in The Right Nation: why America is different .

Vanity Fair ran a cartoon this summer depicting Dubya in a Stetson too big for his head, so covering his eyes. But that, I insist, is the whole attraction of the man. He’s not one of them! He’s not presidential. The office is too big for him. And that’s what we love!

Bush is best with his sleeves rolled up. Frankly, Kerry would look parfait perusing the porcelain in the White House China Room, but downright ghastly trying to hoedown with the hicks.

Yes, the presidency is changing. It is becoming, for want of a better phrase, more Bush than Kerry; more Mel Brooks than … ooh, I don’t know, Orson Welles, perhaps.

The BBC’s Will Walden put a slightly different twist on it: “Americans revere the office, not the man, but in choosing the man, they want someone who befits the office, and in a time of war that office befitted George W Bush best.”

Well, this is only just about true, and only because George W Bush now is the office. (In the same article, Walden also offered the striking insight: “There had never been a post-9/11 election before, because there had never been a 9/11.”)

“I love all the presidents, but President Bush is something more special. He makes you happy,” the suspiciously named Georges de Paris, the President’s official tailor, told the International Herald Tribune’s Elisabeth Bumiller.

Bush makes us all happy. That’s why we love him so. That’s why we’ve moved his longhorn steer furniture into the Oval Office and binned Jackie’s exquisite Louis XVI pieces.

Our fathers were never the president, but trifling detail aside, Bush is one of us. There’s nothing presidential about us schmos. We see ourselves reflected in Bush. We are all made in Karl Rove’s image.