Maybe you haven’t heard, but next week America elects a new president. And also, maybe you hadn’t heard, but the final choices our nation of 320 million people came up with don’t exactly excite the masses. Yes, it’s hard to believe that a process that takes three years, several billion dollars, a questionable media, slippery donors, and hollow promises to cut your taxes, raise your wages, lower crime, and increase college graduation rates, while achieving peace and tranquility around the world, doesn’t result in our brightest and most honorable leaders stepping forward.
That’s why we have television, which has turned out many a bright and honorable leader of the free world. As well as the occasional much more truer to real life incarnation than we’d like to admit.
So in no particular order, and because we want to make the American president fun again (hats are coming), here are the best, and the not so best, Presidents of the United States that television has given us.
Jed Bartlet – The West Wing
Of course the dean of television presidents is the former two-term governor of New Hampshire, Nobel Laureate in Economics, and knower or all things historical and trivial, Josiah Edward Bartlet (Martin Sheen: Apocalypse Now, Grace and Frankie). His namesake even signed the Declaration of Independence. It doesn’t get much more American than that.
A devout Catholic who once flirted with the idea of becoming a priest, leading him to choose an undergraduate education at Notre Dame, he appointed the first female Chief Justice and helped negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal at Camp David. Shot once, elected twice, and hands down the most popular television president in history. What we wouldn’t give to have Bartlet for America running one more campaign in 2016.
David Palmer – 24
While President Bartlet’s time in office was smooth, relatively speaking, President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert: Major League, Return to Lonesome Dove) had a very difficult presidency. Even before he was in office there was an intricate plot to assassinate him during the California primary in what was really just an awful day. Some Slobodan Milosevic wannabe tried to kill him, the press found out that his daughter had been raped years earlier and that his wife covered up many of the sordid details, including the fact that then Senator Palmer’s son was a murder suspect, and he was even forced to fake his own death at one point.
Later, as president, he survived an attempted coup and a deadly virus–although only with the use of a wheelchair and many many drugs–and was eventually undone politically by his decision to re-join forces with his ex-wife for his reelection. In the end he just served one term, opting to end his reelection bid in the middle of the campaign. After a brief stint in the Delta Force (The Unit) President Palmer has spent mush of his post-political career selling Allstate insurance.
Laura Roslin – Battlestar Galactica
So, not technically ever President of the United States, she was instead President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. That’s because there was no United States yet. Or Earth, aka, the 13th colony. Where the 50,000 surviving humans eventually reach at the end of the series, some 150,000 years ago. (Hooray for geekiness!)
Back to President Roslin (Mary McDonnell: Dances With Wolves, Independence Day, where she was First Lady). Cancer survivor, teacher, and not afraid to stand up to the military leadership of Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos), a future admiral and a future Supreme Court justice to be appointed by President Bartlet, she created the first Quorum of Twelve, also survived a coup, and was a big proponent in the push to find Earth, even with other inhabitable planets were discovered.
Frank Underwood – House of Cards
The Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey: The Usual Suspects, LA Confidential) pros: Willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. The Frank Underwood cons: That includes murder.
He has a rather complex and disturbing relationship with his wife, which is matched by his rather complex and disturbing relationship with his top bodyguard. In fact, it’s a challenge to find any relationship of Underwood’s that isn’t complex and disturbing.
Not one afraid to get down in the dirt, he has used the NSA to spy on his current Republican opponent for President, and the very last time we saw President Underwood, he was allowing a hostage to be butchered on television to take the heat off of some bad news stories being released about him.
Selina Meyer – Veep
Like Frank Underwood, President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Seinfeld, The New Adventures of Old Christine) took over the Oval Office when her predecessor was forced to resign. Unlike Underwood, she didn’t orchestrate the resignation. Or seem at any time an actual threat to murder the sitting president. Selina Meyer is, shall we say, almost too self-centered to ever contemplate murder. That would involve another person, and she doesn’t “do” other people. Not even when that other person is her daughter.
A Senator from Maryland, like David Palmer, she became Vice President following her failed bid for president in 2012. Not exactly known for hiring “the best people,” President Meyer has left one imprint on the federal government with last season’s election of Jonah Ryan, the former liaison between the White House and the Vice President’s office, to the House of Representatives from the great state of New Hampshire.
President Meyer, on the other hand, appears to be former President Meyer. Even her last ditch effort to swallow her pride (and other unmentionable colorful euphemisms that can only come from the mouth of Selina Meyer) and return to the Vice Presidency failed.
Pick you write-in candidate for November 8th wisely.
