I predict that in 2016 the US will elect its first Celebrity President, meaning a person who is already famous for something other than politics and has not held elected office before.
Why? Attention spans are becoming shorter, people are getting stupider, and campaign managers are getting more cunning and ruthless. Even today it must take immense restraint not to paste a carefully calibrated set of positions onto someone like Will Smith and watch the votes pile up. The promise of instantly huge name recognition even among people who normally don’t vote, experience before the camera, and an existing managed persona make it inevitable.
We have already had Celebrity Governors (Reagan, Schwarzenegger and Ventura) and several Celebrity Congressmen (Franken and surely others). The Presidency is the next logical step.
Who will it be? George Clooney? Oprah? An athlete? Or someone who isn’t even famous yet?
I kinda get your drift, but the presidency is in a different league. You have to be able to raise a ton of money, which means you have to get a lot of rich people behind you. They may not be so easily seduced by a Hollywood Teen Idle as the general public is. I think Ronald Reagan is more the prototype-- got famous outside politics, got in at a lower level, and then made a run for the top spot.
But if it happens, can I nominate Bill Maher? I may not agree with everything he says, but at least he’s almost always funny saying it.
Reagan worked his way up, and had a lot of experience in politics before becoming president. Ventura was a navy SEAL and a mayor before he was a governor. And Schwarzenegger was a self made millionaire (I think) before he even broke into acting. So they all have either innate talent, strong work ethics and/or a long history in politics before they broke into large state or national races.
Someone like Will Smith has nothing like that, his entire success is due to acting and he has no track record in politics. Plus he wrote the song ‘you saw my blinker bitch’ which he threatened to punch a 90 year old woman in the face. I don’t think that will go over well with the AARP.
The first celebrity President was probably Washington… I think we can agree that he worked out OK.
Other war hero/celebs
Harrison, Taylor, Grant… not so good. :smack:
T. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy - perhaps their success depends on your party affiliation? :dubious:
Reagan was an actor famous for playing second fiddle to a chimp. His greatest role was playing the US President… (while surrounding himself with even more chimps?)
If you mean first person who got to be President for no really good reason. That would be Ford… followed by Carter.
OTOH, why not a Colbert/Stewart 2016 ticket? At least then we could laugh at the government instead of the other way around.
I’m not referring to war heroes. There is obviously already a tradition of that. However, the war hero president is an important precursor to the pure celebrity president. It shows that people don’t stop to ask why a guy who is good at breaking stuff and killing people would make a good Chief Executive. Likewise, people won’t stop to ask why someone who can throw a football very well would make a good Chief Executive, and if they do, the answer will be: He can make quick decisions under pressure! He has to remember all the plays! He can get the most out of a team! In fact, the only thing holding team athletes back now is probably the fact that they’re disliked by fans of every team they’ve played against.
So, I’ll modify my assertion thusly: a celebrity is someone who has not only never held office, but has no particular experience running a large enterprise of any kind. A pure personality, if you will. I suppose that excludes Oprah. I’m talking more like a Dr. Phil or a Geraldo Rivera.
That’s a good point, although Hoover had been Secretary of Commerce and “Undersecretary of Everything Else.”
Hoover was a fascinating person and it is unfortunate that the historical consensus regarding his handling of the stock market crash has drawn attention away from everything else he did. He translated De Re Metallica from the Latin and is considered to have saved large numbers of Europeans from starvation due to WW I.
If people were in fact getting stupider, John McCain would be president right now. Not because of McCain, who despite his unfamiliarity with technology seems to be a reasonably intelligent man, but because of Sarah Palin, who appears to have been created by some mad scientist to be a magnet for “low-information voters” the way dog poop is a magnet for flies.
As for the OP’s assertion, while I don’t think it’s totally impossible for this type of person to become president, it’d be awfully hard. You need a natural constituency within your party to even really get started/raise initial money. You need to win over people in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, who tend to be very politically active. You need to have connections to the right people so you can get the right staff. You need to have been careful throughout your history to have not done/said anything too controversial, or at least have the ability to defuse past incidents.
So you’d have to probably be a celebrity who’s already enmeshed themselves in the political establishment but also is seen as being somewhat intelligent and has some fairly identifiable opinions on the issues of the day. If George Clooney was a happily married man, I think he could pull it off. But he’s not - Americans don’t want a serial monogamist as president. I can’t think of anyone else who comes close to checking off all the boxes on this.
I agree with everything you said but note that Palin got a major party nomination, was on a ticket that got 46% of the vote, and now has a seat at the grownup table. People have to contend with what she says, no matter how stupid.
She may have needed a few more “low-information” voters to push her over the top, but there are so many, many more low-information voters who could be brought to the polls by just a little more cynicism and pizzazz.
It’s coming, just wait. I think it’ll be either an athlete or a talking head.
On the one hand (the one that watched Sarah get a shot a being a heartbeat away from President) I view this with the same dispair of an eventual planet-killing asteroid strike.
On the other hand… do we really WANT another “professional” politician? That’s not what government in this country was supposed to be. The positions were supposed to be a form of public service, more akin to doing jury duty than a permanent profession. Granted, the Founding Fathers probably imagined it to be a duty carried out by the brightest and most competent of the citizenry… learned men (!) that would treat the positions of arthority with respect. Instead it has all the respectability of an evening soap opera. If I stated to the American people, “Politicians are nothing more than over-paid whores that pleasure themselves at our expense instead of the other way around!” then I’m fairly certain a large percentage of the population would not disagree.
Is that what Washington, Jefferson, Franklin etc. forsaw of their republic? I think perhaps if they knew the state of affairs today, they would have paid the tax and drank their damn tea in silence. :mad:
The problem with the “professional” politicians is that they are permitted to repeatedly act in their own short-term self-interest. That’s something that could be exploded by the right kind of independent celebrity. On the other hand, with the wrong kind of celebrity, the corruption could simply reach its logical endgame: he/she will be told what to do by a set of sponsors or handlers much as what went on with Strom Thurmond in his declining years and is going on with Gabrielle Giffords now. The public gets the image and the sponsors get the spoils. With a pure personality as president, there won’t be any annoying principles getting in the way of doing exactly what he/she is told. An actor would be perfect - someone who’s already accustomed to pretending to stand for something. The trouble is finding one who has no skeletons in the closet.
