Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

TV’S COMMANDER IN CHIEF: A FORGETTABLE PRESIDENCY
by Terry Heath, 2005

The American public has been bombarded with television, radio and print advertisements all summer that informed us that ‘this fall a woman will be president.’ No, it’s not 2008 and we’re forced to listen to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s expected presidential campaign ads. Instead, it’s ABC-TV’s new one-hour weekly dramatic television show entitled ‘Commander in Chief,’ which premiered on Tuesday, September 27th.

This new show stars actress Geena Davis who will have to work very hard to convince us that she is America’s newest chief executive. This is no knock on Miss Davis who obviously has acting talent since she has won an Academy Award. But the show being presented to us is fundamentally flawed in that we are to believe that a major party president would pick as his running mate someone so far from their own political beliefs, then conveniently die and let that running mate take over, who then makes major changes that goes against everything that the political party in power believes in.

That’s the basic premise being presented in that a female president named Hillary… I mean, Mackenzie Allen, a politically independent vice-president, takes over the presidency when the Republican president who is aptly named Theodore Roosevelt Bridges, the one Republican chief executive that liberals like because he started us on the road to big government back in the first decade of the 20th Century; suddenly dies while in office of a brain aneurysm. This part of the premise is actually credible, as for the thirty-seven men who have been elected as our nation’s presidents; eight have died while in office and one resigned. So that means there is a one in five chance of a president being replaced while in the White House.

But before dying of his illness he asks Ms. Allen, a one-time congresswoman and university chancellor, for her resignation as vice-president so the power hungry Republican Speaker of the House, as sinisterly as one could play such a character by actor Donald Sutherland, would be next in line if the president would die and take over if needed. But the chief executive passes away before she has a chance to do so after agreeing to step aside. She then decides to not resign and accepts the responsibility of our nation’s highest office after a conversation with the house speaker over how one would rule the nation and world leads to conflict between the two.

This new show was created by writer Rod Lurie who also wrote and directed the motion picture flop ‘The Contender’ that was about an independent minded woman politician who was about to be selected as this country’s first female vice-president. But her confirmation is mired by allegations of a sex scandal from her college days and she is forced to take on the male-dominated political world of the U.S. Senate to clear her name. Wow, this writer sure can stretch the same basic idea to its maximum usage. I suppose his next TV show will be about the first female secretary-general of the United Nations!

The story line of this television show is unrealistic from the opening scene of its first episode. Plus, doesn’t this portray women politicians in a bad light by implying that the only way they can hope to get into the White House is through the back door by having a male president drop dead? And this is, as its creator Rod Lurie has publicly suggested; supposed to help Hillary Clinton’s chances in 2008 when she makes her expected run for the presidency?

Anyway, if a true independent tried to take power from the two main political parties in Washington they would face certain confrontation from the power elite for such treasonous acts. Look at the last time a candidate of one major political party crossed party lines to choose someone from the other side of the aisle. That was Republican President Abraham Lincoln when he selected Democratic Tennessee U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson in his 1864 re-election bid as part of the renamed Unity Party ticket. They handily won that contest but Lincoln was assassinated one month into his second term. Johnson took over as president but spent most of his time battling the Republican controlled Congress for the next four years of his administration over how reconstruction of the south was to be achieved. The Republican leaders finally got tired of this interloper so impeached and unsuccessfully tried to remove him from high office when he attempted to fire the Secretary of War for insubordination. He survived being removed from the presidency by just one vote in the Senate but it finished his effectiveness as a president.

Three other ‘accidental presidents’ from the 19th Century, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur, also served out their predecessors term but were not nominated for another term by the handlers of their political parties so history shows that those who run the political parties want a loyalist to their specific causes, not some wide-eyed dreamer who wants to do what they think is best for the nation.

But back to this television show. We’re supposed to believe that a president, even a dying one, would ask his vice-president to resign, even if it’s obvious that the president is on his deathbed? This idea seems so unlikely, even in the most extreme circumstances, that a chief executive would face or pursue. Although there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Richard Nixon pushed Spiro Agnew out of the vice-presidency in 1973 over allegations that Agnew took bribe money while as Maryland governor but since Nixon had his own problems to deal with regarding his and his staff’s attempt to cover up crimes committed over the Watergate scandal he never personally asked his vice-president to step down. Besides, when Agnew did resign in October, 1973 when it became apparent to him that the federal government was going to hound him until he did so it only made it that much easier for the Democrats in Congress to force Nixon out one year later.

So the most realistic example of what this TV show should represent is how Gerald Ford came into the presidency in 1974. He replaced Agnew as vice-president in 1973, then became president upon Nixon’s resignation in 1974 over Watergate. He ruled as a caretaker chief executive for two and a half years and although he tried to seek election to a full term in 1976 he had inherited too much political baggage and lost to Jimmy Carter.

But we’re talking about a visual medium that must tell a story in a forty-eight minute time span and do it in a manner that an audience of TV viewers with a simplistic attention span can understand. So that realistic portrayal of a replacement president is not likely to occur with any degree of plausibility as each episode must showcase some positive resolution by the actions of a fictional chief executive which sometimes cannot be obtained in the real world of Washington politics.

An independent president, devoid of political support from either party, won’t get much done in the White House during their tenure. All you have to do to realize what would happen when an independent is elected to a high office is examine one-time professional wrestler Jesse Ventura’s single term as governor of the state of Minnesota under the Reform Party banner. He couldn’t get cooperation for his ideas of state government reform from either the Republicans or Democrats in his four years in office and wisely declined to run for re-election.

Is this country ready for a female president? Sure, if it’s the right one that the public would support and believe. But this badly conceived television show won’t help Hillary Clinton or any other woman considering a run for the White House in three years or beyond. Besides, even if Hillary wins in 2008 she still wouldn’t be the first female to make the necessary decisions in the confines of the White House. That honor goes to Edith Galt Wilson who made most of the top decisions on governing this nation on behalf of her ailing husband Woodrow following his October, 1919 stroke until he left office in March, 1921. Now that would be an interesting dramatic story to showcase to the otherwise uninformed American television viewer.

So if this far-fetched scenario of a political independent, being male or female, ever really happened; then they would have to rule as a caretaker president, similar to what Gerald Ford and the accidental presidents from the 19th Century endured, and would obviously not be nominated for re-election by either mainstream party unless a third party could truly become influential and willing to endorse that incumbent’s cause. But that’s not likely to occur at the present time and under our current electoral system.

The final assumption for this TV show we are supposed to accept is that President Allen realizes she has only two years left in this fictional term to build a positive consensus for the nation and her own administration by her presidential edicts before deciding if she wants to submit to the voters for a second four year run. I’m betting that not only won’t she serve those two final years but that she’ll be cancelled in thirteen weeks by the American viewers, with the few episodes of this failed series to join all the other female accented cancelled shows that end up being rerun on the Lifetime cable channel.

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com