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- Presidents' Day
- Places & Culture
- Dialogue: Bonnie Hunt
- Weekly Digest
Presidents' Day is one of the most underrated holidays on the calendar. We go all out to celebrate days with far less significant antecedents, such as Halloween and Mardi Gras, and most people at least bat an eye at the arrival of Groundhog Day, April Fool's Day, and Columbus Day. So you'd think we could summon a little more enthusiasm for a day set aside to venerate our loftiest national heroes. To judge from television advertising, the day seems to exist mostly to give furniture stores another excuse to have a "blowout sale." Perhaps we feel saturated with presidential holidays, less than a week after Lincoln's Birthday and a week before that of Washington (the man for whom Presidents' Day was more or less instituted).
But apart from its designated holiday, you could argue that celebration of the presidency in America is overstated—that the cultural weight of the presidency far exceeds its political weight. If I were a political science major, I'd produce a more ponderous piece on the relationship between the executive branch and the other branches of government, but as a journalist, my question is this: is there a bias in the news and historical media (and thus in our cultural awareness) toward over-covering and over-celebrating (or over-excoriating) the president compared with other branches of government, simply because the president is easier to cover, and because we have an insatiable appetite for singular, godlike icons?
You could make a case that Congress and the Supreme Court have far more influence in shaping the public contours of our daily lives—they actually make and interpret the laws, respectively, while the president is lamely mandated in the Constitution to "enforce" the laws—and that very little of what the president does affects us on a day-to-day basis, apart from sending troops to war and keeping foreign leaders from getting mad at us (not to downplay these tasks, especially at a time of multiple international crises).
And yet the president's every step and spoken word is covered breathlessly by CNN and pondered endlessly on PBS and the History Channel. After all, it's easier to cover one person, and focus on one face, than to try to cover the multi-faceted legislature or judiciary in tightly packed segments on the evening news. You can't grab viewers and readers with personal drama if you're talking about 535 people, in Congress' case, the way you can with one. As for the Supreme Court, whose members have indefinite tenure and set standards of justice that can stand for decades, it hardly gets any media coverage (partly because the Court keeps the media at bay—in a 24-hour news world, it is one of the most influential brokers of power to keep itself and its personalities shrouded in mystery).
Still, the symbolic function of the president, in addition to the occasional wise and unifying leadership the office provides, does much to justify the focus of the news and historical media. Our country has the desire and sometimes the need to esteem one person the way we do the president, especially when national crisis arrives, whether it be September 11 or the Columbia disaster (at such times, the president plays a benedictory role—note the spiritual nature of Reagan's Challenger speech and Bush's Columbia speech).
Although we remain fundamentally different from most Western European governments, whose prime ministers have most of the power to set the agenda and whose presidents exist to smile and shake hands at various photo-ops, the rise of the mass media in the 20th Century has made for a fascinating discussion about how the U.S. president's political and communicative functions are converging. In this column on Ronald Reagan and the media, I quoted columnist Meg Greenfield, who wrote that under Reagan, "seamless visual projections had come to be seen as synonymous with the act of governing itself." The following essays—most of them from The Atlantic, which does some of the most in-depth writing on the cultural impact of the presidency—ponder this growing connection between presidency and projection.
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