Has there ever been a president cooler than Obama?
Benny Huang joins a once-revered weekly periodical in asking.
That’s the question Newsweek, an ostensible “news” magazine, asked
last week via Twitter. The tweet featured a picture of the president
slapping hands with his friend and political supporter, the rapper Jay
Z.
It’s hard to argue with Newsweek on this one. Obama is
cool—though that alone doesn’t make him a great president. When it comes
to leaders, coolness and greatness might actually be mutually
exclusive.
Cool people aren’t usually substantive and frequently lack
the moral courage to do the right thing when the right thing isn’t
cool—which happens to be most of the time.
The shortcomings of a cool president were on full display in
September 2012 when Islamist terrorists launched a pre-meditated assault
on the US Consulate in Benghazi. While brave Americans were fighting
for their lives, the president was asleep at the switch—perhaps literally.
The White House has been less than forthcoming about what the president
was doing while the attack was underway, calling his whereabouts an “irrelevant fact,”
though some reports indicate that he went to bed. Whatever he was doing
it was apparently relevant enough for the White House to conceal it.
We do know what the president was doing the next day—hangin’ with Jay Z and Beyoncé, of course!
Oh sure, the four Americans in Benghazi were already dead at that point
so I suppose there’s nothing he could have done about it. But
still—what was he thinking? He clearly wasn’t all that engaged
with the situation unfolding across the globe, though he would have been
if he had been a leader of any caliber because that’s what leaders do.
Cool presidents, on the other hand, blow it off and attend fundraisers
hosted by their celebrity friends.
Benny Huang goes on to discuss the meaning of the word "cool" (James Dean and Elvis Presley fit the definition while show biz personalities with a
kind of personal magnetism like Tony Martin and Clark Gable were not so much
cool as “Glamorous”), pointing out that "the concept didn’t [seem to] exist until about the mid-1950s."
… As the 50s made way for the 60s, America found itself in the midst of a
bitter culture war between the forces of cool and the rest of us drab
squares. Battle lines were drawn. Things such as the length of one’s
hair, the music one listened to, and the clothes one wore became the
markings by which people on both sides recognized friend and foe. The
demarcation line was never clearer than in the summer of 1968 when “hip”
Abbie Hoffman (et al) faced off against Chicago’s very “square” Mayor
Richard Daley.
If the baby boomers seem to care so much about coolness it’s because
they invented it. It should come as no surprise then that America’s
first baby boomer president, Bill Clinton, was also its first cool
president. Some might argue that that distinction belongs to President
Kennedy, though I would contend that JFK was more glamorous like Clark
Gable than cool like James Dean.
The Clinton campaign of 1992 was revolutionary because it pitted a
young, genuinely cool Bill Clinton against the old fuddy-duddy George
H.W. Bush. It didn’t seem to matter that Bush was a genuine World War II
hero; America chose the younger, cooler guy. Clinton made his pitch to
young voters on MTV, a tactic never before tried. He played his saxophone, wearing shades
no less, on the Arsenio Hall Show. The audience writhed in ecstasy for
Clinton’s performance. He was the coolest cat in America, even cooler
than Arsenio, which was no small feat.
Unfortunately, he also reduced politics to a popularity contest
indistinguishable from a junior high student council election. The
coolest kid in class gets to be the president by default; or at least
that’s the way it worked when I was in school. As strange as it sounds,
grown-up elections weren’t always this way. They used to turn on
substantive issues rather than publicity stunts, which is what Clinton’s
saxophone performance was. Though his gimmick worked like gangbusters,
it also cheapened the electoral process. He isn’t embarrassed by it, I’m
sure, but he should be.
As the world became aware that Bill Clinton was a womanizer, even a
sexual harasser, the president leveraged his coolness to turn the tables
on his critics. Sure, he enjoyed a little hanky-panky from time to
time, but who doesn’t? Prudes, that’s who! It was those same squares who
ragged on him for smoking a little weed in college and dodging the
draft. Once critics had been labeled uptight pantywaists, the narrative
was set. Clinton weathered the storm and came out looking like the
victim of “sexual McCarthyism.”
Never mind that the actual articles of impeachment were for perjury and
obstruction of justice—it was still “all about sex,” which some people
were clearly neurotic about, namely Ken Starr and the Republicans.
During the 2004 election season, the Kerry campaign fell back on
Clinton’s tried and true strategy, though obviously with less success. … In the end, Kerry’s cool-based campaign wasn’t enough to put him over
the top because the publicity stunts seemed contrived, an obvious
cut-and-paste job from Bill Clinton’s successful ’92 campaign. The
reason it worked for Clinton and not for Kerry is because Clinton is
actually cool whereas Kerry is a big dork. All the snowboards, guitars
and motorcycles in the world couldn’t change that fact.
Four years later, an upstart young senator from Illinois named Barack
Obama rallied to win the Democratic nomination. If ever there was a
candidate who could exceed Clinton’s cool quotient, Obama was it. He was
cool squared. After sailing to victory in the general election
he proceeded to make the presidency a big joke—even more than it
already was. Obama couldn’t be bothered to render a proper salute
when disembarking Marine One because he’s too cool for that. He’s too
cool for checks and balances, too cool for separation of powers, and way
too cool for his intelligence briefings.
Yet he still got reelected. Obama bamboozled a majority of voters not once, but twice!
Not to mention the mainstream media, who "inform" (sic) the voters in the first place. And who, truth to tell, were entirely willing accomplices in the bamboozling.
That’s the power of cool in America.
This trend toward cool candidates running cool campaigns is pretty
darn alarming, if I do say so myself. Great leaders rarely do the cool
thing, and when they do it’s entirely accidental. Great leaders do the
right thing, often while the cool kids stand on the sidelines and jeer.
Which gives ammunition to those who say the youth vote ought to be diluted, meaning the 26th amendment might have to be repealed.
