Since we last spoke about politics on here, things have changed dramatically. The Democrats have been shocking the world by using things like “strategy” and “effective messaging” to leverage something called “enthusiasm.” Tim Walz went from someone I had truly never heard of to a surrogate father to millions. And Kamala Harris has become the first woman of colour Presidential nominee in U.S. history.

Pundits have been fretting over whether this country is ready to elect a Black woman, while our former phrenologist-in-chief and his weirdo running mate have been questioning whether she’s Black, and for how long. Unlike every other modern president, we don’t really have an existing paradigm for Kamala. We have had one movie star* President, one reality TV star President, and one tabloid mainstay President whose family inspired decades of fictionalizations.

argued recently that shows like Scandal and Watchmen have prepared us to see a Black woman in power, and that got me thinking about what we’re used to seeing—not just in real life, but on our screens. And since I’m a navel-gazing millennial, I thought exclusively about the Presidents we’ve had in my lifetime.

The Clinton presidency is where we got some really vivid fantasies of what a “presidential” President could be like. Clinton was so powerfully flawed that we could never entirely be proud of him as our leader. Even before he became President, his baggage was borderline radioactive. So the men we put onscreen were cartoonishly heroic alternatives. Instead of a draft-dodging war dove, we got a former fighter pilot who suited up and flew against alien invaders after giving the most rousing movie speech in three decades. We got a Vietnam Vet and Medal of Honor recipient who killed Russian terrorists with his bare hands and snarled at them to get off his plane. And, unlike their real-world counterpart, both of these men were pointedly doting husbands. So were Sorkin’s Presidents, Jed Bartlet and his movie predecessor Andrew Shepard. Even their mistakes—typically, not being bold enough, or underestimating the depravity of their enemies—were political miscalculations, not personal failings.

George W. Bush’s “election” was actually my second presidential heartbreak (8-year-old Marion was a huge Ross Perot fan), but it’s one I still haven’t fully recovered from. It felt like the 90s bred such comfortable ennui in voters that it didn’t seem like a risk to vote for the charming idiot with neon red daddy issues. What’s the worst that could happen, right? And then, for some reason, our pop culture President portrayals in the Bush, Jr era got a lot less hopeful.

We weren’t fantasizing about what more we could get anymore. We were scared and angry, with 24’s Obama-esque President Palmer (Georgetown grad, but he also hooped!) under constant threat of assassination until he finally was assassinated. Or we were baldly contemptuous of how clueless and ill-equipped our President was to handle any crisis, from robots in disguise to cataclysmic environmental events. The fact that we were even open to the “hope” that the next guy ran on is almost miraculous.

Compared to his predecessors, Barack Obama seemed almost like he walked from our screens into the White House. As though he was cinematically presidential, because he was cinematically predicted—not just by Dennis Haysbert on 24, but by Jimmy Smits on The West Wing (who was himself based on Obama) and Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact. This man was elegant, eloquent, and capable of electrifying voters. His wife became an icon in her own right, and their relationship is still held up as #goals to this day.

And so our pop culture depictions mutated again. The Obama surrogate on House of Cards, Garrett Walker, was soft-spoken and elegant as well, and played by a Canadian actor in what I’m interpreting as a bank shot to approximate Obama’s “otherness”. And he was also so naive and impotent that Kevin Spacey’s cartoonish machinations successfully pulled off a bloodless coup against him. Scandal went in an entirely different direction, making its President a white Republican veteran, a man who could shame Congress into passing gun control legislation, and who was ensconced in a passionately toxic affair with Kerry Washington. It was a darker fantasy than what we saw in the Clinton era, but it was fantasy nonetheless. Still, my favourite Obama surrogate has to be Jamie Foxx in the criminally under-seen White House Down. The fact that that adorable movie flopped while the grotesque Olympus Has Fallen got a sequel was, to me, the first hint of what was to come.

And then, Trump.

Trump’s entire 21st-century persona was manicured by his hit reality tv show The Apprentice, so by the time he started his nativist birther attacks on our first Black president, he almost felt like the Goofus to Obama’s Gallant—both charismatic personalities who seemed liked they belonged on our screens, except one of them is defiantly boorish where the other is somewhat apologetically aloof. And as Trump set about shredding every written and unwritten rule of law he could find, pop culture generally failed to reflect him in any meaningful way. You can’t caricature a caricature, after all. Every portrayal—including just literally repeating what he said and did—felt too silly to take seriously, a fact that the real Trump and his acolytes took serious advantage of. And by the time we were dragging ourselves to November 2020, many of us weren’t voting for Biden so much as for an end to the absolute lunacy of Trump’s reign of terror. We were drained.

Now we find ourselves in both new and familiar territory. For something like two decades, Hillary Clinton was the only woman we could really imagine in the Oval Office, onscreen and off. Even Robin Wright’s diabolical Claire Underwood was a funhouse mirror reflection of Hillary, all seething ambition and schemes with a faux-feminist polish.

The few Black female presidents we’ve seen in pop culture—I’m thinking of Alfre Woodard’s character in State of Affairs, and Toks Olagundoye’s in Veep—didn’t register much with audiences. (Kemi Talbot’s two-term presidency is only mentioned in passing in the final scene of Veep’s final episode.) In our newly official Democratic nominee, we may have an opportunity to rethink what “presidential” looks like. On the other hand, Kamala Harris does remind me of a couple of people. The excitement over who we think she is seems like it’s at risk of overtaking who Kamala actually is as a politician. Her fans project all kinds of policy positions onto her, based mostly on vibes, and passionately defend those vibes against detractors. Not unlike in Obama’s first term. And not unlike the Beyhive, honestly. And as much as I hate Stan culture in general, I hate political Stan culture even more.

Oh yet and still, I’m curious to see what our culture, pop and otherwise, does with a Black woman of colour presidential nominee. Beyond Maya Rudolph’s SNL portrayal, of course.

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