Are our presidents really running things or are they just puppets?

"Picture if you will ..."

Imagine living in a country where people no longer connect with other people, where they know more about the family in their favorite television comedy than they do the people who live next door.

Imagine a country where no one reads books or newspapers, where all their information comes either from television or the Internet, where it is difficult to tell fact from opinion or satire from reality.

Imagine a country where politicians are packaged like corn flakes or radial tires, where they rarely have to answer a question they don't want to answer.

Was it always this way?

Have we always been so gullible that we would believe whatever we were told by someone who looked authoritative? If not, when did it start?

It may be overly simplistic to blame everything on television, but it might not be far wrong to say postwar advertising -- of the "Mad Men," Madison Avenue variety -- changed nearly everything in our society.

Through the '50s and '60s we heard all about how advertisers used their techniques to make people buy things they didn't want or need.

The 1960 election was the first one in which television played a major role, mostly in the nationally televised debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

Nixon felt television cost him the election, so when he ran again in 1968, most of his efforts were centered on how to package himself for television. It was done so effectively that Joe McGinnis wrote a book about it.

Nixon's campaign was the first one run primarily by advertising people and not by politicians. They limited access to their candidate to one event a day, staging events carefully so that the media would have little choice of what to use from the candidate's day.

That was when we first started hearing the term "sound bites."

Nixon won in 1968 and again in 1972, but the 37th president was far too flawed and uncontrollable to give his backers what they really wanted -- a free hand with the government.

But Nixon was just a step along the way. He may have been someone in basic agreement with the people who were backing him, but he wasn't a man who could be told what to do. What they needed was someone who could play a role, and of course they found him.

Any list of the 100 best actors in Hollywood would not include Ronald Reagan, who was never nominated for an Academy Award and whose only Golden Globe was for community service in 1957.

In fact, when studio mogul Jack Warner was told Reagan was going to run for governor of California in 1966, his response was classic.


"Jimmy Stewart for governor. Ronald Reagan for best friend."

Reagan was never that much of an ideologue. He started as a New Deal Democrat, but became conservative after meeting Nancy Davis and through her, her right-wing father Loyal Davis and his friends.

His political philosophy was always very simple. He was anti-Communist and he believed in lower taxes and smaller government.

He was pretty flexible on most other issues, including signing California's first legalized abortion law. In fact, once you got past his three core principles -- Commies bad, taxes lower, government smaller -- he didn't really care much about anything else.

There are two kinds of actors, those who follow the script word for word and those who improvise. If you can imagine the late Robin Williams as a politician making a speech, it would be high in entertainment value and low in discipline.

Then consider the other type, one who reads the script, learns his lines and takes direction well. The ideas aren't often his, but he can present them more effectively than the people behind the ideas can.

People pretty much understood this about Reagan. One of the most humorous "Saturday Night Live" skits of the Reagan years had the president showing a much higher level of intelligence behind closed doors, speaking foreign languages and displaying a Nobel laureate's knowledge of economics.

The humor, of course, was that everyone knew that wasn't Ronald Reagan.

Reagan left office in 1989, but it was just 12 years later that we had a president who made Reagan look like a quiz kid. This guy called himself "the Decider" and wore a package-enhanced flight suit when he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.

George W. Bush was the son of a president, but he considered himself the spiritual descendant of Reagan. There was one crucial difference, though. If Ronald Reagan was anything, he was comfortable in his own skin and rarely seemed worried what other people thought of him.

Gee Dubya wasn't. He had one thing Reagan didn't -- a mean streak.

He didn't seem to have much grasp of the issues either, and most people thought that he was the Charlie McCarthy to Dick Cheney's Edgar Bergen.

In the end, that's what really matters. If the president is a puppet or an actor, we need to know who's pulling the strings or writing the script.

Otherwise, it's just a television show without a point.