Reality Reflects Hollywood

A 30-year-old film recalls and predicts.....

Current events often make connections in a timeless fashion. That which is has been and will be, continuously without clear differentiation. One such obvious connection was that of Joe Biden’s Presidency to that of the founder of American Progressivism, Woodrow Wilson. Hollywood, in mirroring one, projected the other and forecast a response.

Wilson praised the benefits of direct governance by elite unelected experts beginning in his 1884 doctoral thesis “Congressional Government A Study in American Politics”. This in reaction to his affection for the more direct form of government by Great Britain, wherein the Ministers (our Cabinet Secretaries) were also members of the main legislative body, the House of Commons. He noted these chiefs of governmental divisions were generally recognized experts in their fields, and if their work, directly and publicly questioned by the Commons, was not found satisfactory, they immediately resigned. The majority (or coalition) party held sway over all legislative business but under the active scrutiny of the minority, free to interrogate the majority on a daily basis on the floor of the Commons. Our system, Wilson noted, was much less efficient, with a hard wall between the legislative and executive branches of government. Neither branch was subject to live public daily interrogation of its means, motives, or actions. In the American House of Congress, responsibility and authority was divided amongst various committees, with a few committee chairs and the Speaker of the House powerfully guiding (or subverting) the will of the people’s elected representatives. Wilson felt that, while the British were thusly mainly concerned with the most efficient and economical running of their government, the American version was already fully captured by the need to enhance economic welfare of business, markedly reducing real efficiencies. In 1884 he noted the Presidency was largely a figurehead, with Congress holding the reins. In the introduction of his 1890 reprint, he felt the Presidency had gained great stature and power, largely due to the Spanish-American War and other international intrigues. By the time he became President, Wilson had a firm grasp of not only “legal” racism but also elitism in executive power. A more detailed examination of his thesis and how it may have predicted his subsequent actions both nationally and internationally would require another longer article. Here I focus on his activism and the sudden substitution of activism required by the organic incompetence from his stroke.

Wilson’s remodeling of the executive branch, aided by the emergencies of WWI, came to a halt in October 1919 with his severe stroke. Thereafter, until March 1921, many historians now feel that his wife, Edith, ran the Presidency. Cabinet Secretaries and Congressmen would come to the White House and place the questions of the day as well as bills with Edith, who would then disappear for some period into the private quarters and return to tell them “What the President wants done”. None of the elected or appointed governmental functionaries were allowed to actually talk to or see the President. No one, save Edith and his medical caregivers, knew his status. Some historians, working with an expert graphologist, might find much of what President Wilson “signed” was performed by proxy. Auto-signature machines were not widely available and used in government until after 1942, although a primitive version, the “polygraph”, was used by Thomas Jefferson. The Presidential power, long wielded by the First Lady, was peacefully transferred in a timely election while the establishment firmly ignored what had been going on.

That establishment remained unconcerned with the underlying issue for many decades, even as Presidential authority and power expanded in response to the Great Depression and WWII. President Roosevelt very nearly repeated the episode, as there are strong questions regarding his full mental capacity during the final Triple Conferences with Churchill and Stalin. Vascular dementia due to his very severe uncontrolled hypertension may have minimized American resistance to Stalin’s post-war plans for Eastern Europe prior to FDR’s death by brain hemorrhage. Only when the nation coped with the death of a revered JFK was potential Presidential disability short of death addressed in the 25th Amendment. Timely, given the near-death of an elderly Ronald Reagan by an assassin’s bullet. Nonetheless, the possibility of a repeat of the Wilsonian problem, an activist aggrandizing President intellectually impaired for an unknown time leaving a full cadre of appointed professional political bureaucrats at great risk of losing their power and livelihood, festered. Fiction decided to answer this question of fact.

Hollywood produced a light-hearted but wholly serious solution to this problem in the 1993 movie, “Dave”. Unbeknownst to the public, the President enters a coma after a stroke. The junta of his closest advisors under actor Frank Langella’s Haldeman-like Chief of Staff decide that transitioning to the righteous Vice-President would be too damaging to their desired status quo. They hide the President’s condition with the all-too-willing aide of the media, even from the First Lady. Unlike Edith Wilson, Sigourney Weaver’s character is estranged from her husband based in how his principles seemed to change on assumption of the office. The deux ex machina turns out to be an exact look-alike of the President, both played by Kevin Kline. He is a pragmatic populist, running an employment agency on a shoestring in a small community where “everyone gets a job”. Easily convinced to serve an even greater public for an indeterminately short time until the actual President’s recovery or death, he becomes the initially compliant doppelgänger, convincing even a skeptical First Lady. Gradually his pragmatic populism begins to give him pause with the designs of the junta. The drift away from the real President’s persona raises the First Lady’s suspicions. Dave, the pseudo-President, recognizes her as a kindred spirit in her frustrated desire to fund a special program helping a worthy section of the populace. Although his desires to satisfy her need are blocked at every turn by the junta, he finds a way to use the “system” of that establishment. Here the prescient event occurs.

Dave, the impostor President who should be a lackey of the political establishment and its elites, imports and empowers an outsider. In real life he has a long-suffering accountant who helped keep his struggling employment agency afloat. This common everyday accountant, played masterfully by Charles Grodin, is recruited by Dave and sworn to secrecy. Grodin is given a version of the Federal budget with the assignment to try to find areas to cut costs so that Dave can recommend funding the First Lady’s pet program. Of course, as any common-sense populist might agree, he is mortified and astonished by the complete absence of any standard accounting procedures, the obfuscation, and the downright prevarication he finds. Even so, Grodin’s character identifies several programs that, if deferred or ended, add up to the monies needed to fund the First Lady’s project. Kevin Kline’s Dave then uses the “illicit” nature of his unelected position to sidestep the junta. After all, Dave and his personal principles are not supposed to be in power, only the original chosen and maintained despite his incapacity.

Since the junta cannot afford to admit their deception, Dave is allowed to meet the Cabinet in a public session. In that crucial scene the President who shouldn’t be there, unfettered now by the control and advice of his elitist establishment advisors and their controls, picks apart each of the individual programs championed by his somewhat confused Cabinet Secretaries. Some of his lines give reasoning later echoed by our current President and his DOGE advisor. He demonstrates either the absurdity of the various program’s intents and policies or their clear intellectual and moral inferiority to that of the First Lady’s proposal. One by one the Cabinet members acquiesce in forgoing, at least temporarily, the funding for each. Finally, he reaches the total needed for the First Lady’s program and gains their reluctant assent.

Upon presenting his completely unexpected support and accomplishment to Sigourney Weaver’s character, she begins to realize what has happened and what the junta has done. She now begins to cooperate with Dave’s disruption. The Junta knows they may have wrought their own demise. They may be revealed as the powers behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain. Their efforts, first to destroy the reputation of the Vice President and then extend this effort to defeat their doppelgänger, is averted with Dave’s portrayal of a devastating stroke before a joint session of Congress. Not unlike a disastrous mental meltdown during public debate. The true condition of the real President must now be known, and an open, if belated, transfer of power to the Vice-President occurs by Constitutional means. Dave is whisked away to a resumed anonymity, willingly returning to his prior role as a community advocate who gets things done. The film has a pleasing coda when Sigourney Weaver’s First Lady, now thoroughly disgusted with the workings of the political establishment, enters private life in Dave’s small community as a helper to his pragmatic efforts and perhaps a future love interest. A variation of the film’s story arc then returns thirty years later.

President Biden’s one term is a remarkable reflection of Wilson’s two terms. While Wilson had achieved success in administrative academia, Biden had almost a half century of success in the political academy. Both acted on the belief of superiority of expert bureaucratic government, encumbered minimally by messy undependable expressions of popular opinion. Both sought to “guide” popular opinion along their perceived pathways of the general welfare. The one brought us into WWI, the other nearly into WWIII. Wilson sought to expand his progressivism worldwide with the League of Nations, Biden through connivance with the World Economic Forum. In Wilson’s time the subjugation of popular opinion to that of the more worthy elite was aborted not by his stroke and incapacity but by a routine election after his prolonged ‘absence” from the office was finally made public. Edith Wilson, like Dave, had extended his presidential themes.

Likewise Biden’s progressive incapacity was concealed not only by the junta of his advisors and a cooperative elitist media, but also by his spouse, perhaps to the point of spousal abuse. Edith Wilson presented issues to her impaired husband and probably made decisions on his behalf for presentation to the Cabinet. Jill Biden more audaciously appeared to preside over a Cabinet meeting with her relatively mute husband, the actual President, in attendance. Biden’s (?Obama’s?) junta replaced him not with a doppelgänger, but ruthlessly killed his repeat candidacy and substituted a cerebrally incoherent candidate, again without due political process She averred, to their delight, that she would do nothing different from what President Biden did do or would have done. Fortunately, a coalition of the gun-clutching, Bible thumping, deplorable uneducated garbage, ie. voters, recognized the farce and brought back a common sense, get it done populist, Donald Trump. And he is, in our imperfect analogy, a kind of ‘Dave”. His first Presidency had been marred by his trusting cooperation with the progressive elitist political establishment. But, like Dave, he had learned of its self-empowering ways, and on his return as President 47 wiped away the czars and czarinas of progressivism in favor of others who had demonstrated competence in the real word. Who, like he himself, were completely dedicated to “getting it done” despite bureaucratic impediments. Trump has even brought in a rather extraordinary version of Dave’s community accountant. Elon Musk in turn has recognized, publicized, and ostracized the fiscal absurdities of that federal elitist bureaucracy. Like Dave, Trump has a very limited time to effect change in government on behalf of the populace before he must return to private life.

We have an unlimited ability to recognize the bizarre repeats of the errors of Progressivism and their self-inflicted descent into dementia. Hollywood provided us a happy ending; we are responsible for how our story arc ends.