A ton of people, both Republicans and Democrats, really miss George W. Bush. But why?
By Erica Slutsky (Writer/Singer/Songwriter)
I don’t know if anyone under 30 knows this feeling now, but being a young Democrat in the early 2000s was like being the fan of a sports team that constantly lost despite great odds. There were a lot of television episodes and movies from that not-too-recent era that carried the unmistakable sentiment of “Rigged!” and most of them took the high road by not even showing then-President George W. Bush as a character (See: Recount). We felt like we were stuck with a President that we didn’t elect, and every excuse felt valid, from the missing ballots in Ohio and Florida, to the fact that the person controlling the ballots happened to be the brother of the President-Elect. Al Gore won the popular vote by a huge margin but lost the Electoral College by 0.5%, and John Kerry lost 49% of the popular vote. Trump’s win and his tax plan may hit millennials the hardest, but many of us over 30 had to deal with a very similar feeling of “It don’t make sense” for years until Nancy Pelosi took back the House midway through Bush’s second term. We did not get hot chocolate and free counseling.
Remember when Mr. Peanutbutter stumped for John Edwards? So full of hope.
Bush seemed like he could barely form sentences, let alone run a country, despite being a C student at Harvard and Yale who served in the National Guard, the second First Kid to become President, the first President to hold an MBA degree, and someone whose biggest non-government job was running a baseball team (yes, really). Writers were afraid of making W look bad, largely because he was a Southern gentleman who respected women and minorities. It seems insulting now to compare Trump to Bush, as I’ve heard way too many times to count from people who were also there. Today, the younger Bush is usually referenced in small, subtle ways (“Like you could grab a beer with him!”) So, when George W. Bush was portrayed fictionally in the moment, we got far more attempts to humanize a man, rather than portray him as the puppet of a vast Republican Axis of Suspicion or the architect of a useless, never-ending war. Even pre-9/11 responses to Bush like the Modern Humorist’s book My First Presidentiary took the obvious route, because very few people expected the outcome. Here’s a fun game: Try to guess how many TV episodes set in the future will feature a tyrannical President Barron Trump.
Image: My First Presidentiary
South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker got Comedy Central to greenlight a sitcom on the First Family called Family First long before the winner of the 2000 election was announced. It was Green Acres vs. The Dick Van Dyke Show, the ultimate sitcom battle (as opposed to The Apprentice vs. Maude). So, when the show premiered under the title That’s My Bush!, complete with a Parker-sung theme song that I’ll never forget as long as I live, viewers shrugged. The series is an atypical multi-camera sitcom featuring a bumbling husband who can’t believe his incredible luck, a sensible wife, a sassy maid, a wacky neighbor, and an evil sidekick (Cheney, natch). It was…low-hanging fruit. Although, the Cartman voice did make an appearance as a pro-life lobbyist who is also an aborted puppet fetus. That’s My Bush had the good fortune to premiere after the inauguration in January and end before September 11. But, as “Cooter”-like as it was, there were great things about That’s My Bush, from a finale that reimagined the premise of the show as different classic sitcoms to the perfectly-cast Timothy Bottoms as Bush. He played Bush in multiple projects, including D.C. 9/11: Time of Crisis and Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course.
The other Bush-like member of that other famous Texan brother acting team in the seventies would get his turn to play W, namely, Bottoms’ Long Riders costar Dennis Quaid in American Dreamz. The film follows an ensemble structure with four intertwined protagonists: A sympathetic suicide bomber who just wants to sing showtunes (Sam Golzari), the producer/host of an Idol-like singing competition (Hugh Grant), a Clarkson-Underwood hybrid (Mandy Moore) with a disturbed boyfriend in Iraq (Chris Klein), and a Bush-esque President who follows orders from an earpiece manned by his bald, aging, war hawk VP (Willem Dafoe). I could probably write an entire column dissecting how much of a fascinating outlier this movie is, from its diverse portrayals of assimilated, wealthy Muslim-Americans to its handling of post-Iraq PTSD and its nonsensical but ballsy ending. I’m shocked that a major studio even bankrolled it. But, as adventurous as its premise and Muslim lead are, the inept Bush character doesn’t add much to the theory that Cheney was the real POTUS. It’s a must-watch, but also a breath of fresh air inasmuch as one of the other Muslim characters is a flamboyant show queen and little else. Still, that Bo Bice parody is everything.
Most Bush portrayals on TV went the Southern Gentlemen route. American Dad produced the episode “Bush Comes to Dinner,” in which rowdy recovering alcoholic W teaches the Smith clan to sow their wild oats while they’re still young. On King of the Hill, lifelong Republican Hank Hill loses faith in Bush when his handshake doesn’t seem manly enough. Will Ferrell’s SNL Bush almost goes without saying but, early on, there wasn’t much to work with besides Darrell Hammond’s Cheney doing all the work. Although, once inaugurated, Bush vowed to install his old baseball team the Texas Rangers as the Supreme Court and quoted “That Smell” at Iraq victory speeches. You could have a beer with him, indeed.
Ferrell’s Bush had a long shelf life, and Broadway producers quickly greenlit a one-man show based around the character, co-written and directed by Adam McKay, called You’re Welcome, America: A Final Night with George W. Bush. Like countless solo shows based on real people, You’re Welcome, America doesn’t really have a plot as much as it takes the facts and character traits of Bush and heightens them to an absurd degree around a fourth wall-breaking performance/confessional (See also: Tru, I’ll Eat You Last, Say Goodnight, Gracie, and Mark Twain Tonight!). Recounting the chronology of the last eight years, Bush mispronounces “Niger,” expresses remorse at 9/11, and does a sexy yacht rock dance with Condi Rice.
Fun Fact: There was also a one-woman Broadway show about the incumbent who lost the Texas governorship to Bush, Ann Richards.
Finally, you have one of the few serious takes on Bush, Oliver Stone’s W. Far too much has been written about the twofold problems of this movie: The supporting characters are essentially one-sided stereotypes based on what little we know or suspect about them, and W’s rise to power is reduced to both a predictable need to make his father (who clearly favors his brother Jeb) proud of him, and his “real” dream of remaining a baseball manager for the rest of his life. And yet, some of the actors in the film, particularly Josh Brolin as W (nice) and Elizabeth Banks as Laura make the most of what little they’re given. It has nearly all of Stone's hallmarks: Surreal dream sequences, weird camera angles, fast edits, a colorful cast of characters. Any armchair critic could have made this movie from what they knew about the Bush administration, and the whole thing feels like an arbitrary first draft that just happened to get greenlit. But it remains a fascinating artifact of an era when few dared to question how seemingly anyone, even a C student, could become President.
ERICA SLUTSKY Erica Slutsky is a writer, singer, and songwriter in New York City. https://ericaslutsky.wordpress.com/
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