Not perfect!

A great article from last week's Time magazine that I thought fit this site:

Barack Obama is growing into the responsibilities of a modern presidential candidate--he has promised his wife Michelle that he will try to quit smoking. "I've quit periodically over the last several years," he says. "I've got an ironclad demand from my wife that in the stresses of the campaign I don't succumb. I've been chewing Nicorette strenuously." Obama is learning what many aspirants to the White House have learned before him--we expect our Presidents to be perfect.

Also perfectly normal. Eccentricity can play as badly on the campaign trail as vice. If Obama has any weird habits along with his unhealthy one, now is the time to chuck them. The ideal candidate in the age of no offense might be the abstemious Mitt Romney--except that his Mormon faith, even though it is 177 years old and made in America, puzzles Evangelicals and liberals.

There are peculiarly modern reasons why Americans watch their presidential candidates with eagle eyes. One is that they can: an omnipresent media and blogosphere try to be omniscient as well, to fill the 24/7 attention hole. Another reason is that as special interests proliferate, so do the trip wires that set off criticism.

Yet Presidents and presidential candidates have long felt pressured to conform to unnatural and confining standards. Those who couldn't meet them often pretended that they had. One of the strictest requirements, since Andrew Jackson inaugurated the era of the common man, has been that the President fulfill what historian Edward Pessen called the log-cabin myth: the personal-creation narrative that begins with humble roots. For some Presidents--the Roosevelts and J.F.K. spring to mind--the effort was clearly impossible. But other patricians in the White House have passed as plebians. In 1840 the supporters of William Henry Harrison called him the Log Cabin and Hard Cider candidate, after his presumed abode and favorite drink. In fact, Harrison was the son of Benjamin Harrison V, a wealthy Virginia planter who had signed the Declaration of Independence. The Bushes, father and son, used Texas as a font for washing away Ivy League associations. Presidents must have simple manners too, concealing pride and other prickly emotions. Thus Dwight Eisenhower, an ambitious and brilliant general, became, in his political incarnation, smiling Ike, whom one Liked.

Given our national love affair with the exalted average, it is remarkable how many men with knobs on their characters have reached the presidency. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist who believed that Jesus was a great moral thinker--rather like Jefferson himself, only better. He assembled his own version of the Gospels, slicing out everything miraculous with a razor. Jefferson kept his Gospels private while he lived, but his views were suspected; archenemy Alexander Hamilton bluntly called him an "Atheist." Andrew Jackson had a more public problem: he married his wife Rachel before her divorce from her first husband had gone through. In later years, Jackson said he had not known at the time that Rachel was technically unavailable. But historian Andrew Burstein argues that Jackson did know and that jumping the gun was socially acceptable on the remote frontier where he and Rachel lived. As presidential candidates, Jefferson was hammered for his lack of religion and Jackson was hammered for his wife's surplus of husbands--yet both men were elected twice. Partisanship and ideology made a space for singularity. Jefferson's and Jackson's supporters cared more about what their champions stood for than what they thought about theology or the divorce laws.

As long as we can find loopholes and make exceptions, maybe it's not so bad that we make Presidents try to fit a mold. In a democratic republic, there must be some community of feeling between the leaders and the led. Warriors have traditionally found it in combat, despite class differences. But the mild norms of politics are a functional equivalent in peace and in war. Our first President set the standard. The Rules of Civility, the etiquette primer that George Washington copied as a teenager, began with this admonition: "Every action done in company ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present." So put out that butt.