The difference between The American President and the American President

I love how wonderfully simplistic The American President, a movie by Rob Reiner, is. Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) is a first term widowed president who is trying to get a crime bill that has been watered down by compromises with the loyal opposition through congress before his third state of the union address. His poll numbers are high and he and his staff are gearing up for his second term election in a little less than a year. They don't want to lay an egg by not getting the crime bill passed.

This is all complicated by Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Benning), an environmental lobbyist with whom President Shepherd falls in love. Presidential advisor Lewis Fairchild (Michael J. Fox) and press secretary McCall (Anna Deveare Smith) understand that this little romance could spell trouble with the electorate, especially when the press catches President Shepherd spending the night with Miss Wade in the White House just down the hall from Lucy Shepherd, the President's ten year old, trombone playing daughter. But the President stands his ground. He maintains that his love life is none of the voters' business and directs his staff to respond to the inevitable prying questions with a "no comment."

Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss), President Shepherd's political nemesis and the certain presidential nominee of the other party, latches onto this romantic development and starts questioning Shepherd's character at every opportunity. He can smell blood on the water. Sure enough, the President's poll numbers start dropping.

All of this comes to a head when Shepherd has to make an odious deal screwing Sydney Ellen Wade's environmental initiative in order to muster enough votes to get his crime bill passed. There is a big confrontation in the President's bedroom with Miss Wade (She apparently can come and go as she pleases in The White House.) and she storms out, leaving President Shepherd to walk the halls reevaluating his job performance of late.

The movie ends with the President popping into a televised White House press conference where he finally attacks Bob Rumson's characater, professes his love for Sydney, drops the compromised crime bill, and sends Miss Wade's ground breaking environmental legislation to the hill. Everyone loves Shepherd's new found gutsiness and his total legislative about face. If there was a chart nearby we could see Shepherd's poll numbers rise even as he walks out of the press room. His aides are happy. Miss Wade takes him back and he ends up walking triumphantly into the house chambers to deliver his state of the union. We don't have to be told that he will win the upcoming election by a landslide. Bob Rumson is no where to be found.

In real life the President's reversal would have been way too late. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin would have already fixed it in the American mind that Andrew Shepherd was an adulterous Nazi. Afer all, when Adolph Hitler was in power he thought about crime all the time and, just like Andrew Shepherd, had a mistress. Coincidence? I think not!

Shepherd's pronouncement that you can't stop crime without getting rid of assault weapons would automatically lose him all white, male voters who would be reminded hourly by Limbaugh and tearfully by Beck that their basic constitutional liberties were being threatened by Andrew Shepherd's socialist agenda.

Global Warming skeptics from Maine to Alaska would see the end of capitalism in Shepherd's call for a twenty percent reduction in emissions in the next ten years.

And of course, Lucy Shepherd's plaintive trombone playing in the White House residence would serve as a potent reminder of the President's failure as a devoted father.

Bob Rumson would win the next election in a walk.