During the last decade, Americans seem to have decided that the best leaders are the ones we would like to drink with.
In 2000, American voters were asked which of the two Presidential candidates, Governor George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore, they would prefer to have a beer with. Bush was the overwhelming choice.
In 2004, when he was challenged by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a Zogby poll found that 57.3 percent of undecided voters would prefer to have a beer with Bush, despite two wars and the failing economy being huge drains on the president’s popularity ratings.
But this election cycle’s image politics has gone way beyond who would be a better drinking buddy. Becoming one of the “Everyday Americans” is now the ideal to which all politicians aspire.
Both Democrats and Republicans go out of their way to prove how “American” they are (or Texan or Christian), rather than making clear what policies they actually believe in. This pandering is condescending to all Americans, Ivy League-educated or not, because our politicians are lumping us into one group that does not exist.
The United States is one of the most richly diverse countries in the world, yet the people who claim to represent us have constructed a false identity for the “common folk” that they then build their policies upon.
Texas governor Rick Perry will be the first to remind you that he is Texan with a capital T. His boots are named “Freedom” and “Liberty” (I’m not sure which is the left boot and which is the right). He said that central bankers like Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke would be treated “pretty ugly” down in Texas, then went on to explain that evolution was taught alongside creationism in Texas classrooms (it isn’t, but everyone remembers how Perry shot a six-shooter at the Texas Motor Speedway, rather than his false claims about his own state’s education policies).
Former ambassador to China Jon Huntsman has run TV ads that show him speeding across the desert on a dirt bike. He has been described as someone who “rides motocross to relax and played in a rock band called Wizard.”
In the ‘90s, many people thought it interesting that our president played the saxophone, but it didn’t make him qualified for office.
Representative Paul Ryan is not running for president at the moment, but in a Q&A session with the New York Times two weeks ago, the House Budget Committee chairman mentioned his affinity for hard rock, his truck, hunting (with a bow) and the children’s version of the Bible that he’s reading to his six-year-old. Apparently, he also butchers the deer he hunts (with a bow), grinds the meat, stuffs it in casings and smokes it.
Is he trying to prove that he’s a tougher guy than Sarah “Mama Grizzly” Palin, who famously claimed to have shot and killed a moose in the Alaskan wilderness?
During the 2008 elections, the McCain-Palin camp jumped on the image of a plumber named Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who had challenged then-candidate Obama about his small-business tax policies.
Nicknaming him “Joe the Plumber,” the McCain-Palin team hijacked Wurzelbacher’s image, using the name to represent all working-class Americans. More than just oversimplifying an entire class of people into “simple folk” who care only about whether their small businesses will pay taxes to “big government,” the iconizing of Joe the Plumber gave politicians a platform from which they could prove their own “American-ness.”
Our very own Harvard-educated president is also guilty of such pandering (like his Yale-educated predecessor). Obama often goes out of his way to “dress down” during town hall meetings, removing his tie and rolling up his sleeves, often while standing next to someone’s backyard barbeque pit.
He talks about his life in the working-class neighborhoods of Chicago more often than he talks about the four years he lived in Indonesia as a child, or his birthplace in Hawaii. He may assume that most Americans don’t care much about Indonesia, but I think President Obama may also be trying to focus attention on just how “average, working-class American” he can be.
Sometimes accusations of un-“American-ness” take literal forms, such as when Obama, while still a candidate, was faced with challenges to his faith and birthplace.
Called a Muslim by some and Kenyan by others (why these words are “accusations” is another matter entirely), Obama produced his original Hawaiian birth certificate in a news conference earlier this year. It became news that an American president was born in the United States.
The emphasis these politicians place on their own education is so minimal that I am afraid that these politicians will neglect education when they are formulating their “down-home” policies. Did you know, for example, that Jon Hunstman is fluent in Mandarin? Or that President Obama was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review? Or that Paul Ryan used to drive the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile?
You think I’m kidding.
The point is that I don’t want a president who is “just like everybody else.” As a college student, I’m automatically one of those dreaded “elites” that candidates are trying so hard to distance themselves from. I have no skill with my hands. I can’t fix a leaky faucet or rewire a house or even change my own oil.
Therefore, politicians appear to think that my wants and needs are un-American and that they do not want to represent me or those like me (increased federal aid to students, anyone?).
But I don’t want someone “just like me” to run this country. Being the President of the United States is, to put it lightly, a huge responsibility, with huge consequences. I want an extraordinary person to be president, who will weigh policy options intelligently and try to do what is best for the country above all. I hope people like Joe the Plumber feel the same way.
And I wouldn’t want one of my drinking buddies to become president. I picture a president holding a Natty Ice in one hand with the other hand poised over the “release all nuclear warheads” button.
Kelsey Allagood can be reached at kallagood@spartans.ut.edu