The shadow president

People say I look like you know who. Why me, lord?

By Sean Elder

Aug 2, 2002 | The first time it happened I didn't pay it any mind. I was having lunch with a couple of young women in Manhattan about a year and a half ago; one was an editor at a magazine I was doing some work for, the other was a writer who had just done a nice story for us. The writer had already made some waves with a novel of the I-was-a-teenage-nymphomaniac sort so popular a few years back. For a middle-aged man such as myself, lunches don't get much more promising.

We were just past the introductions, opening the menus and ordering drinks, when the young nympho fixed me with a frank gaze.

"Did anyone ever tell you," she said, smiling coquettishly, "that you look just like George Bush?" I must have shot water out of my nose because she hastened to add, "I find him very attractive!"

"You know, you do kind of," the editor said. The rest of the lunch passed in a blur as I tried to study my reflection in the silverware. At least she didn't mean George Sr.

The next time it happened I was at another lunch. The editor of a men's magazine was interested in hiring me to write for them on a regular basis. We were in one of these clubby old steak houses where you can imagine them killing the steers in the back room, but I was not wearing a suit, nor was my jacket adorned with an American flag stick pin. I was in the middle of making some droll observation when he leaned forward and squinted a bit.

"It's weird," he said, "but you look just like the president. Has anyone ever told you that?"

Once, I admitted, but the woman who said it was so crazy that she thought the president was hot. Maybe, I suggested, people just have Bush on the brain.

"No," he said with determination. "There's definitely a resemblance." Reminding myself how much I wanted the job I grimaced and agreed. For all I knew this guy was part of W's inner circle. For all I knew he thought George was hot.

It would be facetious of me to say that I have nothing against our president. Like half the country, I was appalled when he was elected and prayed for an uneventful four years. And like 95 percent of the country, I prayed even harder when things got eventful last year that he had the character to get us through this crisis. My feelings about his intelligence or qualifications are balanced by a sense of hopeful fear, or fearful hope. As LBJ told the American people, "I'm the only president you've got."

But as my feelings about George W. Bush vacillated I never once thought: Damn! I wish I looked like that. Too beady-eyed, I thought. Too jug-eared. Too weak-chinned. Too ... rich.

I decided that in my media engorged city I was just hanging out with too many people who watched too much TV. Out in the heartland no one would mistake me for the president, or his doppelgänger. I happened to be on assignment in the heartland last October, doing a story in Hibbing, Minn., when I heard those fateful words. I was sitting in a restaurant called Zimmy's -- a sort of shrine to Bob Dylan, Hibbing's most famous son -- interviewing a couple of locals. We'd had a nice talk and I was paying the bill when one of them said to me, sotto voce, "You probably hear this all the time."

Uh-oh. "What?" I said, smiling hopefully.

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