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Notes Introduction 1. In his filmography of all Hollywood films featuring presidents since 1908, John Shelton Lawrence identifies 127 films.Lawrence,“A Filmography for Images of American Presidents,” 383–402. For a good review of films that feature presidents in the 1990s, see Prince, “Political Film in the Nineties.” 2. John M. Murphy reveals the power of popular culture and its depictions of the presidency when he suggests the possibility of a return to a heroic tradition for presidential rhetoric in his admiration for various mediated presidents such as Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact, Harrison Ford in Air Force One, Bill Pullman in Independence Day, Michael Douglas in The American President, Kevin Kline in Dave, and Martin Sheen in TWW. Murphy, “The Heroic Tradition”; see also Christensen, Reel Politics; Gianos, Politics and Politicians; and Giglio, Here’s Looking at You. For a discussion of the presidency as depicted in popular fiction, see Rochelle, “The Literary Presidency.” 3. Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles, Constructing Clinton, 3. “Presidentiality” is the discursive manifestation of Bruce Buchanan’s discussion of “presidential culture” that involves citizens and the psychological impressions of the presidency that are “imbedded in the public mind.” Buchanan, The Citizen’s Presidency, 26. Our concern, of course, is with how these impressions are expressed rhetorically with ideological resonance for the U.S. political culture. 4. Greenstein, The Presidential Difference, 3; see also Ragsdale, “Studying the Presidency .” 5. Norton, Republic of Signs, 91. 6. Hinckley, The Symbolic Presidency. 7. Skowronek,The Politics That Presidents Make; see also Abbott,Strong Presidents; Cronin and Genovese,The Paradoxes of the American Presidency; Hess,Presidents and 09.notes.183-202_Parry-Giles 12/12/05 4:46 PM Page 183 the Presidency; McDonald, The American Presidency; and Nelson, ed., The Presidency and the Political System. 8. Miroff, “The Presidency and the Public,” 300. 9. Farrell, “Rhetorical Resemblance,” 17. 10. Gebauer and Wolf, Mimesis, 31. An additional commentary on the materiality of mimetic images is offered by Twining,“On Poetry Considered as an Imitative Art,” 45–46. 11. Gebauer and Wolf, Mimesis, 119.We do not ignore the shifts and changes in the role of mimesis in aesthetic and literary history. For our purposes, however, the constructed process of imitating the U.S. presidency is a component of the ideological meaning of TWW. For a fuller discussion of the shifting meanings of mimesis, see Auerbach, Mimesis, and Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation.” 12. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (The Emotional Tie) refers to mimetic efficacity in his discussion of the role of hypnosis in psychoanalysis and the relevance of rhetoric to the psychoanalytic process. 13. Discussions of the hyperreal nature of American politics can be found in Fiske, Media Matters; Luke,Screens of Power; Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles,“Meta-imaging”; Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles, Constructing Clinton; and Schram, “The Post-Modern Presidency.” 14. Sigelman, “Taking Popular Fiction Seriously,” 151. Additional discussions of political fiction are found in Redefining the Political Novel, ed. Harris; Howe, Politics and the Novel; and Milne, The American Political Novel. 15. A study from the University of Missouri demonstrates just how influential programs like TWW, and TWW in particular, can be to the formation of attitudes about the U.S. presidency. Holbert et al., “The West Wing as Endorsement.” 16. Edelman, From Art to Politics, 66. 17. McBride and Toburen, “Deep Structures,” 134. 18. The 2000 election saw an expansion of candidate appearances in various television venues.Al Gore and George W.Bush were featured on Oprah, Late Night with David Letterman, The Tonight Show, and Live with Regis, just to name the most noteworthy . This, of course, was preceded by Bill Clinton’s famous appearances on The Arsenio Hall Show and the Donahue program in 1992 as well as numerous appearances by both Clinton and Republican Robert Dole in 1996. For discussions of this phenomenon see Davis and Owen, New Media and American Politics, and Diamond and Silverman, White House to Your House. 19. Mutz, “The Future of Political Communication Research,” 231. For a discussion of the persuasive impact of news and entertainment content, see Eveland, “The Impact of News and Entertainment Media.” 20. Pierre Bourdieu maintained in his lectures on television that the medium “poses a serious danger for all the various areas of cultural production—for art, for literature, for science, for philosophy, and for law.” Bourdieu also argues (On Television , 10) that “television poses no less of a threat to political life and to democ184 . notes to...

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