Last week in these pages I noted the unusually large number of New Yorkers in the running for the US presidency. Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani and the current mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, all have high hopes of representing Democrats, Republicans and independents respectively in next year’s election.
But in my customary haste, I omitted to mention perhaps the best-known face of all in the race.
Arthur Branch is the District Attorney for New York County, the official, legal name for Manhattan. He is that unusual but highly attractive political figure – a successful, elected conservative Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. How successful? No Republican has held the Manhattan DA position since Thomas Dewey in the 1930s, who later became governor and was famous for momentarily beating Harry S. Truman in the 1948 presidential election – at least in a newspaper headline – before the real results said otherwise.
Mr Branch combines a gruff, laconic manner with a suitably tough approach to crime in the big city. As DA he rarely prosecutes cases himself these days but exhorts his team of subordinates to visit the full majesty of the law on his criminal targets. He supports capital punishment and has a robustly conservative approach to the law, deriding those who take a creative view of the US Constitution.
Even so, when occasion demands, this Draco of the American judicial system can be pragmatic and occasionally crosses his zealous underlings by agreeing to messy plea bargains with the ugly procession of murderers, rapists, terrorists and child molesters that wanders through his offices.
As a presidential contender his experience makes him a compelling law and order candidate. Then again, that may be because he is the Law and Order candidate.
If you are an aficionado of television detective series you will know that Mr Branch’s other name is Fred Thompson, the actor who plays this entirely fictional character in Law and Order.
Though as yet formally unannounced, Mr Thompson’s candidacy is probably right now the most talked about in American politics. Just the merest hint a few weeks ago that he was pondering a run energised the Republican race, and the momentum is building. An opinion poll of Republican voters published in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal put Mr Thompson third among the party’s candidates, narrowly behind Senator John McCain and Mr Giuliani, the current fragile front-runner.
To be fair, Mr Thompson is not just an actor with a great Hollywood repertoire of leadership roles (in films and TV he has been a White House chief of staff, a submarine commander and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency). He was a senator from 1994 to 2002 for his home state of Tennessee, where he was wildly popular as a man of the local soil. Back in the 1970s he earned his first political stripes as a young lawyer on the Watergate Committee conducting impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, where he sat alongside an idealistic liberal named Hillary Rodham, later Clinton. If his hagiographers are correct, he was the man who coined the damning question that formed on the lips of the nation: “What did the President know and when did he know it?”
What is more, Mr Thompson, unlike the other contenders in the Republican race, seems like a genuine conservative (who would have thought Republicans had to turn to Hollywood to find one of those?). He has a consistent record of being ant-iabortion, pro-tax cuts and a stolid defender of US military action.
And yet for all his real-world government service and his good conservative credentials, it is hard to escape the feeling that Mr Thompson is lighting up the contest at the moment because he is the Imaginary Candidate. Republican voters, demoralised by their present political condition and unenthused by their current field of candidates, are projecting their hopes and ideals on to a man that most still know best only as an entertainer. Much in his background remains unexamined – it is not widely known, for example, that before he commanded fictional submarines and prosecuted make-believe criminals, he was a real-life Washington lobbyist, stained, it can be safely presumed, by some of the grime you have to wade through to do that job effectively.
Comparisons with Ronald Reagan are seductive but a bit of a stretch. Though Mr Reagan, the middling B-movie actor, was never taken seriously by the Left (to their great cost), by the time he ran for the presidency he had built an extraordinary curriculum vitae, not only as governor of the nation’s largest state but as a leading figure in the battle of ideas that conservatives came to dominate in the late 1960s and 1970s.
The excitement around Mr Thompson reveals not just a dissatisfaction with the available Republican contenders, but a much larger escapism on the part of voters, anxious to flee the present-day horrors of real-life Washington. Barack Obama, suddenly now becoming the leading Democratic contender, may not have acted in any movies but his message of hope and change offers the same idealised blank slate for Democrats disillusioned by their own tired and uninspiring leaders.
President George Bush’s ineptitude and increasingly bunkered immobilism makes Americans yearn for something new, even if it may not be wholly believable. But so too does Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, who this week matched the Bush Administration’s tin-eared, ham-fisted flailing with a profoundly stupid declaration that in effect, the US has already lost the war in Iraq but should go on fighting it for another six months in any case.
No wonder, given what’s on offer, that Americans are in a mood to embrace the Imaginary Candidates. But unlike Hollywood, where the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief is a necessary part of the bargain, in politics hard reality always prevails, and disappointment is almost guaranteed.
