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The Presidency, Prime-Time Popular Culture, and U.S. Nationalism Let me tell you something. We can be the world’s policeman. We can be the world’s bank, the world’s factory, the world’s farm. What does it mean if we’re not also. . . . We’ve made it into the New World, Josh. You know what I get to do now? I get to proclaim the National Day of Thanksgiving. This is a great job. —President Josiah Bartlet, “Shibboleth” on december 13, 2000, millions of Americans turned to their television sets at 9:00 p.m.EST to view a program about presidential politics.NBC promised viewers that Wednesday evening a gripping and insightful exploration of an assassination attempt on senior White House staff members.Not only were eager viewers to learn about the psychological toll of presidential assassinations but they were also to experience,as they did every week,a behindthe -scenes glimpse of what life is like in the West Wing. Those millions of viewers that cold winter night may have been disappointed when their weekly encounter with presidential politics on The West Wing (TWW) was replaced by the “real” politics of Campaign 2000. Instead of the soothing, surrogate presidency of Josiah Bartlet, viewers saw instead the compelling oratory of Vice-PresidentAl Gore and Texas Governor George W.Bush as they responded to the Supreme Court’s decree halting the Florida recount. The strange coincidence of December 13, 2000, when the quest for the presidency preempted the dramatic exercise of presidential politics on TWW, points to the powerful collusion of reality and fiction in contemporary U.S. political culture. Americans are increasingly finding fictionalized representations of presiIntroduction : 01.intro.1-20_Parry-Giles 12/12/05 4:42 PM Page 1 dents and the presidency in literature, film, and on television. In the 1990s alone,thirty-one films featured presidents or members of their family prominently , from box office successes like Dave and Air Force One to less popular but more artistically adept films like Jefferson in Paris.1 These fictionalized presidents , as well as those found in many novels and on television, regularly engage serious issues and define presidential leadership in powerful and meaningful ways, reflecting the cultural preoccupation with this institution and its place in our national culture.2 Sometimes the depictions are humorous,other times quite serious. But whatever their tone and purpose, such fictionalized depictions of the U.S.presidency provide a commentary on the nature of presidential leadership. A fictional depiction of the presidency offers what we have previously called a “presidentiality,” or a discourse that demarcates the cultural and ideological meaning of the presidency for the general public. Some presidentialities are fictional, some are not, and the presidency’s meaning emerges from the many different voices and divergent texts that use as a referent the office of president of the United States and the individuals who hold that office. A given presidentiality is thus responsive to context and collective memory,and it defines,in part,the national community by offering a vision of this vital of- fice of the U.S. political system. Given its constitutive character, each presidentiality invites the continued scrutiny of the ideologies and boundaries that circumscribe the presidency and presidents in U.S. political discourse.3 Created by Article 2 of the Constitution,the U.S.presidency has developed over two centuries and continues to evolve. Presidents are the men who have occupied this office and the women and men who will eventually assume the role. In addition, the presidency is, arguably, the most important and symbolically meaningful institution of the U.S. system of government. No other branch of the federal government—not Congress, not the federal courts—is the focal point of public discussion, cultural angst, or political hope in the same way. Simply put, individuals who occupy the presidency embody the national polity. “The president became the most visible landmark of the political landscape, virtually standing for the federal government in the minds of many Americans,” notes political scholar Fred Greenstein.4 These leaders thus represent the United States internationally and become the expression and receptacle of communal ideology. On a symbolic level the president also functions as a “signifier,” Anne Norton concludes, and in this role “the President calls up not only the American nation, the government, the executive branch, and the triumphant party (already a rich—and variable—assem2 . introduction 01.intro.1-20_Parry...

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