It has been an altogether dazzling month for public political cannibalism. Two weeks ago, the president of the United States gave a historically godawful performance in a debate against the former president*, who showed up wearing the impenetrable armor of complete mendacity. Not even Richard Nixon at his most lycanthropic lied the way the former president* lied in that debate. The former president* was the surviving embodiment of Mary McCarthy’s jab at Lillian Hellman—everything he said was a lie, including “and” and “the.” Yet for two solid weeks—and for the foreseeable future, near as I can tell—the discussion of the campaign has centered on the current president*’s performance.
And that is the key word in this whole mess: performance. Biden’s first term was one of the most energetic and accomplished since Lyndon Johnson took over, and perhaps since Franklin Roosevelt was first elected. Most of the doubt expressed over the past two weeks concerned how the president performed onstage. I recognize the importance that has come to signify in our politics. I have no illusions that performance skills can swing the balance of an election, one way or another. It goes back at least as far as William Henry Harrison’s log cabin, if not Lincoln’s. Warren Harding’s primary virtue as a candidate was that he “looked like” a president. And all that was before television. In the pages of this very magazine, Norman Mailer saw what was coming next. In his legendary piece “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” for my money the greatest piece Esquire has ever run, Mailer saw the future as embodied in the 1960 Democratic candidate for president, the young senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy. Mailer wrote:
Yet it was also, one could argue—and one may argue this yet—it was also one of the most important conventions in America’s history, it could prove conceivably to be the most important. The man it nominated was unlike any politician who had ever run for President in the history of the land, and if elected he would come to power in a year when America was in danger of drifting into a profound decline.Mailer imagines himself as an old-line political boss confronting the young and ferocious Kennedy machine and failing to understand that the field of play has changed beneath his feet.
He comes to this convention resigned to nominating a man he does not understand, or let us say that, so far as he understands the candidate who is to be nominated, he is not happy about the secrets of his appeal, not so far as he divines these secrets; they seem to have too little to do with politics and all too much to do with the private madnesses of the nation which had thousands—or was it hundreds of thousands—of people demonstrating in the long night before Chessman was killed, and a movie star, the greatest, Marlon Brando, out in the night with them. Yes, this candidate for all his record; his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.And then there was, of course, the candidate himself.
All the while the band kept playing the campaign tunes, sashaying circus music, and one had a moment of clarity, intense as déjà vu, for the scene which had taken place had been glimpsed before in a dozen musical comedies; it was the scene where the hero, the matinee idol, the movie star comes to the palace to claim the princess, or what is the same, and more to our soil, the football hero, the campus king, arrives at the dean’s home surrounded by a court of open-singing students to plead with the dean for his daughter's kiss and permission to put on the big musical that night. And suddenly I saw the convention, it came into focus for me, and I understood the mood of depression which had lain over the convention, because finally it was simple: the Democrats were going to nominate a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, was indisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.It is the rare journalist who is there when the hinges creak and a door into a new world comes open. Rarer still is the journalist who notices that moment immediately and clearly. Only in retrospect can many of us see what Mailer saw that day in Los Angeles sixty-four years ago this summer, because we saw the missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs, and the rise of—and brutal resistance to—the civil rights movement. And we saw Dallas, and then Memphis, and then the floor of a hotel pantry in Los Angeles. And this is what Mailer saw as that decade, glorious and appalling, began to unfurl.
Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.In the history of bad presidential public performances, very few come up to President Andrew Johnson’s disastrous “Swing Around the Circle,” a long train tour throughout the Midwest in 1868. Johnson was trying to sell his Reconstruction policies such as they were, which was not very much, truth be told. He brought along U.S. Grant, David Farragut, and George Custer as set decorations for his speeches. (This was a major mistake, as at every stop the crowds went wild for Grant and booed the president.) Now stop me if any of this sounds familiar.
Johnson was death on the stump. He rarely wrote speeches, relying instead on what he believed was his innate gift for reaching The People. His speeches were long, repetitious, and utterly boring. The same could not be said for the president’s audiences, which, when the tour hit Cleveland, spun completely out of control. The president, who was known to savor what former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld referred to as “the amber liquids,” couldn’t resist the temptation to throw down with the hecklers, who increased in number at every stop. In Missouri, when a heckler accused him of betraying the Union cause for which so many had died, Johnson retorted with the following:
“I have been traduced and abused,” he shot back, his voice tremulous with self-pity. “I have been traduced, I have been slandered, I have been called Judas Iscariot,” he shouted. And just because he exercised his veto power over the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill or Civil Rights, his enemies said he ought to be impeached. The sympathetic members of the crowd cried out, “Never.” “Yes, yes!” he answered, and then speaking of himself in the third person, cried, “They are ready to impeach him.” “Let them try it,” his supporters answered back. But he was incoherent. “There was a Judas once,” Johnson babbled, “one of the twelve apostles. Oh, yes! And these apostles had a Christ, and he could not have had a Judas unless he had twelve apostles. “If I have played the Judas, who has been my Christ that I have played Judas with?”The New York Herald Tribune headlined its account of this episode “The President’s Trip from Springfield to St. Louis: He Denies That He Is Judas Iscariot” (information the voters needed to know). The tour ended when a reviewing stand collapsed in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, of all places, killing thirteen people.
Biden’s debate performance was not quite that catastrophic, but it was terrible television, and that was enough to scare his party to death, cause his funders to close their wallets, and compel his fellow Democrats—too many of them, actually—to seek refuge in anonymity, and all for performance’s sake. “But for ceremony,” as Shakespeare’s Henry Plantagenet moans before the battle. And I remember again what Mailer wrote, at the beginning of this political era that is speeding toward its dramatic—and possibly destructive—end.
Yes, America was at last engaging the fate of its myth, its consciousness about to be accelerated or cruelly depressed in its choice between two young men in their forties who, no matter how close, dull, or indifferent their stated politics might be, were radical poles apart, for one was sober, the apotheosis of opportunistic lead, all radium spent, the other handsome as a prince in the unstated aristocracy of the American dream. So, finally, would come a choice which history had never presented to a nation before—one could vote for glamour or for ugliness, a staggering and most stunning choice—would the nation be brave enough to enlist the romantic dream of itself, would it vote for the image in the mirror of its unconscious, were the people indeed brave enough to hope for an acceleration of Time, for that new life of drama which would come from choosing a son to lead them who was heir apparent to the psychic loins? One could pause: it might be more difficult to be a President than it ever had before. Nothing less than greatness would do.But less than greatness has had to do, down through the intervening decades, and never more than it must now.
This article originally ran in the Last Call with Charles P. Pierce newsletter on July 13, 2024.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.
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