Legal Commentary

The Public Figure

By Big Tent Democrat

The latest manifestation of the fascination with the private lives of public figures got me to thinking how bizarre it really is that people seem to think they know or have some type of relationship with public figures, particularly politicians. It is the strangest of conceits among political commentaters and voters because it is, to me at least, so utterly ridiculous.

Ed Kilgore wrote a good piece about this about a week ago, before the latest brouhaha broke out:

Salon's Joan Walsh published a sound rebuttal of Brooks' suggestion that successful American politicians are those who are unambiguously rooted in a clearly defined geographical, cultural, or temperamental mileiu. She cites John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and most of all, the synthetic cowboy George W. Bush, as presidents with complex and often self-contradictory backgrounds that rival anything "rootless" or confounding about Barack Obama.

Walsh could have gone further, insofar as complicated people have been the rule more than the exception among residents of the White House. There was Richard Nixon, whose entire career (as best documented by Rick Perlstein's brilliant book Nixonland ) involved an endless ambivalence towards the elite circles he despised and longed to join. There was LBJ, who aside from the ambiguities involving his views on race and economics, was a pathologically domineering personality whose political ascent was based on playing the submissive son to a series of powerful father figures (FDR, Rayburn and Russell most notably). Even an ostensibly "simple" figure like Eisenhower was actually a master Machiavellian who deliberately cultivated the false image of a genial and apolitical national father-figure. . .

We do not know these people who run our country in any way and we should stop pretending that we do. We know what they say and do in their public lives and that is what we can judge and comment on. And do what we can to make them do what we want them to do. The rest of the psychobabble and hero worship is all rubbish.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on August 11, 2008 (boomark / email).