To a certain degree, Bagehot’s law was adopted as well by American presidents, whose status was upheld by a tradition of decorum and whose prestige was accentuated by a certain—well, mystery. George Washington spent much of his adult life rehearsing the role of national patriarch; even Andrew Jackson jealously guarded the dignity of his office. Once, when William Allen White was interviewing William McKinley, a photographer entered the room to take pictures. McKinley promptly set aside his cigar: “We must not let the young men of this country,” he told White, “see their president smoking!”
With time, of course, that sense of decorum, of self-conscious distance, eroded as standards evolved. Theodore Roosevelt’s young family—his elder daughter’s wardrobe, his school-age sons’ mischief—attracted the attention of the press. His cousin Franklin addressed the public directly by radio, affecting a deliberately casual manner. Yet even by 1962, when television cameras were brought into the White House for a prime-time tour of the premises by Jacqueline Kennedy, her interlocutor addressed the first lady with elaborate deference. And when the president himself briefly appeared toward the end of the program, it was as if he had descended from Olympus into the upstairs sitting room.
Nowadays, of course, we tend to equate dignity with pomposity, and like to point and laugh at the examples of Dwight D. Eisenhower avoiding the raucous White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and Richard Nixon walking along the beach in dress trousers. Gerald Ford toasting his own English muffin was a reassuring sight to Americans in the aftermath of Watergate, as was Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural hike up Pennsylvania Avenue. But informality can be a two-edged sword, as Lyndon Johnson discovered when he revealed his scar from gall-bladder surgery. And the slope from the flesh of a presidential gut to presidential DNA on a blue dress is a slippery one.
Which brings us to what might be called the Obama Paradox. The president’s admirers like to point to what they call his dignity, perhaps mistaking his famously detached manner for something it is not. As every American can see and hear, the president is not a demonstrative person and, by all accounts, not an especially warm individual, either: Obama has tended to treat Democrats on Capitol Hill with the same deference as Republicans—which is to say, very little—and his personal loyalty is largely reserved for his own person. Still, all presidents are egotists, to some degree, and it’s no crime to be the rare White House introvert. What makes Obama unique is the extent to which he has also made himself painfully ubiquitous. Whereas presidents have tended to nourish their prestige by conserving public exposure—there’s that “mystery” again—Obama has made himself virtually unavoidable.
All presidents are also celebrities, by default; but Barack Obama is the first president who has tended to behave like the modern definition of one. Of course, it would be one thing if he and the first lady were habitual visitors to the opera or regularly sought diversions consistent with their Ivy League diplomas. But even middlebrow culture seems to leave Obama cold. He seems happiest when hanging out with his many admirers in show biz, and his routine appearances on television are not confined to the news.
Indeed, until Obama, presidential performances on TV—apart from speeches and press conferences—were essentially unknown. It would be difficult to imagine FDR making a cameo appearance on Jack Benny’s radio program or Ike swapping stories with Jack Paar. Even televised interviews—Walter Cronkite with JFK (1963), Nixon with a quartet of network correspondents (1971)—were so rare as to be sensations. But a threshold of sorts was crossed, in 1992, when candidate Bill Clinton showed up on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talk show and played the saxophone. As much as anything, the performance was an emblem of the long-shot status of the Arkansas governor’s candidacy, and President Clinton never repeated the stunt. But then candidate George W. Bush paid a visit to Oprah Winfrey in 2000, and the rest is history.
Obama has raised ubiquity to an art form. The president, who is alleged to be an occasional smoker, has been (like his predecessor McKinley) careful to conceal his habit from the public. But there seems to be no limit to the number, or character, of TV programs he repeatedly visits: Good Morning America, Today, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and “slow-jamming the news” on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon might be said to have some tenuous connection to the public interest; but the list includes more dubious venues such as The View, The Colbert Report, The Late Show with David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Ellen, The Daily Show, Live! with Kelly and Michael, even Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, among others.
It’s impossible to picture Ike, or even his successor JFK, on a program called Full Frontal. But this is the world we inhabit. Donald Trump, unlike Barack Obama, is not especially welcome in such precincts; but he is a creature of the television culture and, after Obama, anything is possible. The daylight now shines like a klieg light on the magic, and the mystery is gone.
Philip Terzian is literary editor of The Weekly Standard.
