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THE ASS, THE ELEPHANT...AND JIM
On the first Presidential debate
Heading into last night's debate, I was still unsure of whom I would choose as President of the United States of America. Now I know. On November 7th, I'm casting my vote for Jim Lehrer.
All the cosmetics in Revlonia could not make Lehrer an attractive man, yet he has a kingly presence conspicuously absent in the other candidates, however handsomer they might be. True, he did not talk as much as they. But when he spoke, his opponents stopped blathering and fell silent. Lehrer commands respect; the other gentlemen are still trying to get it housebroken.
My candidate was poised, exhibiting the grace under pressure good presidents must possess. He adhered to the rules of the game, rather than going off on boring tangents about can-collecting grandmothers and weeping flood victims. And he stuck to the issues.
Lehrer was clearly prepared, but did not make an ostentatious display of his knowledge, as did the Ass candidate, nor did he attempt to deflect his ignorance with a smirkily delivered soundbyte, as did the Elephant.
Take the question on the Yugoslav election. The Asinine candidate saw fit to lecture us on the history of warfare in the bellicose Balkans -- as if we didn't know that since World War I began in Sarajevo with Princip's assassination of Serbian Archduke Ferdinand, the region has been a loose affiliation of internecine ethnicities held together solely by the iron will of the Croat dictator Tito, whose death in 1980 made civil war inevitable. Whereas the Elephantine candidate appeared incapable of telling a Serb from a Saab.
Would you want either one mediating a Barak-Arafat summit at Camp David? Of course not. You'd want someone with some experience mediating something -- a presidential debate, for example. Someone whose experience in foreign affairs was not limited to attending funerals of Middle Eastern heads of state, or vomiting on Asian prime ministers. Someone like Jim Lehrer.
Like the Ass, my candidate has a background in journalism. While the former forsook the reporting of the news to the making of it, my candidate carved out a niche as one of the most respected journalists in recent memory. Lehrer has written more books -- 12 novels, two memoirs, three plays, at last count -- than the Elephant has read.
Speaking of reading, let's examine the educational background of the three. Lehrer has a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, one of the finest public schools in the land. Presumably his admittance had little to do with his being a legacy. The Elephant was graduated from Yale, where he took classes called "Voodoo Economics," "Fuzzy Math," and "Remedial English." The Ass attended Harvard, as many asses do, rooming with actor Tommy Lee Jones. You can almost imagine the scholarly dialogue in which that pair must have engaged:
ASS: I did not illegally finance my campaign with soft money from crooked Indonesian businessmen!
JONES: I don't care!
(Jones, incidentally, denies using his former roommate as the model for the character he played in 1995's Batman Forever, the villanous Two-Face).
But what impressed me most about Lehrer was his humility. Here's a guy who has won more than 30 awards for journalistic excellence, and you'd never know it the way he comported himself. Meanwhile his challengers would have you believe they were the Second Coming, if not of Christ than at least of Harry Truman. Give me a break! The one has spent the last eight years playing Andrew Ridgely to Bill Clinton's George Michael (who also got caught with his pants down), the other is Chief Executive Officer of Texas -- where, to be fair, he did do a lot of executing, but so what?
It boils down to this. If I'm picking someone with whom to party, I go with the Elephant; not hard to picture him guzzling Busch through a funnel. If I'm picking someone to teach A.P. American History, the Ass is the man. But if I'm picking someone to run the executive branch of the government, select new Supreme Court justices, command the Armed Forces and, above all, not sound like a big dope on the boob tube, I endorse the ablest man in the assembly hall last night: James Lehrer.
By Greg Olear
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