The Heroic Tradition in Presidential Rhetoric

466 Rhetoric & Public Affairs The Heroic Tradition in Presidential Rhetoric John M. Murphy As I prepared this essay, my local cable company kindly provided me with a free weekend of Showtime and The Movie Channel. Happy to have any excuse to abandon the computer, I settled down to the longest movie I could find, a showing of the recent disaster epic Deep Impact. As many readers probably know, the film tells the story of an America facing an "extinction level event"—a big space rock is heading for Earth. What struck me about the film is its utter lack of evil. There are no bad people. Elijah Wood sacrifices his chance for safety to save the girl he loves. The astronauts, led by Robert Duvall, sacrifice themselves to save the world. The star reporter, played by Tea Leoni, sacrifices her chance for life to save a rival and her child. The American people as a whole sacrifice themselves to civility; as it seems the world is coming to an end, they do not rape, loot, or pillage. Most impressive is Morgan Freeman as the President of the United States. He tells the truth, he prays for the nation, and he renews our hope in a lovely speech at the end of the movie. A presidential speech ends this movie. Tellingly, there isn't even an explanation as to how or why a black man became president; in this America, he just is president. I decided that I could vote for Freeman—just as, in recent years, I have decided that I could vote for Kevin Klein (Dave), Michael Douglas (An American President), Bill Pullman (Independence Day), Harrison Ford (Air Force One) and Martin Sheen (West Wing). Now many who know me would probably suggest that my preferences have far more to do with the liberal cast I've assembled than with anything else. Yet there is something more going on here. Over the past decade an unusual number of movies and television episodes have portrayed the presidency. With the sole exceptions of the evil Gene Hackman and the weak Ronny Cox in Absolute Power and Murder at 1600, respectively, the president is a good guy—and even Cox turns out okay. Equally important for our purposes, rhetoric is at the center of most of these films; at critical moments, Klein addresses a joint session of Congress, Douglas speaks to the assembled press corps, Pullman inspires his pilots with what is, in effect, Henry Vs battle speech, and Sheen regularly gives inspirational talks to his staff and the country. West Wing, in fact, has become something of a cultural phenomenon—it's John M. Murphy is associate professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 3, No. 3, 2000, pp. 466-70 ISSN 1094-8392 Forum on the Future of the Presidency 467 regularly in the top 20 in ratings, it has made the covers of Entertainment Weekly and Brill's Content, and it has already been nominated for a number of awards, including a Peabody Award for the show and a Golden Globe nomination for Sheen. In short, even as pundits decry the decline of politics and the degradation of the presidency, ordinary people applaud the heroism of fictional presidents and the durability of the institution—evil chiefs of staff, nasty senators, foreign terrorists, alien invaders, not to mention big space rocks, stand no chance against the powerful words of the President of the United States. Cut to flags waving, music swelling and we have found ourselves in another dimension, beyond sight and sound. Call it: The McCain Zone. Such popular culture matters—political rhetoric, particularly presidential rhetoric, does not exist at a distance from the discourses that course through the nation. At other times, I've spoken of this notion as the novelization of American politics.1 Drawing from Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin, I've argued that, just as the novel sustains and displays the tensions between its languages and voices, so, too, does the American polity sustain and display the tensions between its languages and voices. In this atmosphere, contemporary rhetoric maintains its coherence, but its sensibility is...