Being Cool
For those of us who have attained a certain age, we well remember the definitive example of being cool. For my contemporaries in the mid-1970s, it was a television character ironically offered as a “greaser” from the late 1950s, named Arthur Fonzarelli, expertly portrayed by Henry Winkler. “The Fonz” as he was popularly known, was an Italian-American, leather-jacketed motorcyclist- quite ironic, considering that Henry Winkler, in real life, was a diminutive Jewish boy who, outside of his role as “the Fonz” was a soft-spoken, sensitive actor boasting a Master of Fine Arts from Yale. Conversely, the epitome of “cool” in the actual decade in which “Happy Days” was situated was another actor, James Dean, who made but three movies prior to his death in a 1955 automobile accident.
There were other examples of “cool” well outside of the acting profession. In sports, it was Johnny Unitas- the Baltimore Colts’ quarterback with ice water running in his veins, facing the eye of the storm in the 1958 NFL Championship leading his team down the field to put the Colts in “sudden death” overtime, which eventually the Colts won against the New York Giants, on another classic Unitas drive downfield. The Beatles redefined cool in the 1960s, dethroning popular music’s previous king of cool, Elvis Presley, who had taken that title from Frank Sinatra a decade before.
Politically, it was John F. Kennedy- not only cool in bearing and appearance, but in substance, as best substantiated in how his administration handled the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, thus averting what might have become an unthinkable nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Comically and pathetically, Richard Nixon tried to be cool, appearing on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In”, delivering the show’s tag line in question form: “Sock it to ME?” It didn’t work and history would show that, in his handling of the Watergate scandal, he socked it to himself and ended up resigning the presidency. Jimmy Carter tried to portray being cool, with a longer hairstyle evocative of the late 1970s, and walking from the Capitol to the White House with his daughter by his side following his own inauguration. His all-too-cool approach to the Iranian Hostage crisis of 1979 led to his downfall, however, when Americans realized that being cool without substance leads one to assume reckless detachment and incompetence. Bill Clinton revived the concept of a cool president, playing his saxophone wearing Ray Ban sunglasses, answering hip questions about his preference in underwear (“boxers or briefs”), which Monica Lewinsky came to know all about, first hand, and he was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice, by playing it too cool in testimony in federal court…so much for being cool…
It has oft been said that much of the young voters’ attraction to Barack Obama is based upon his being cool. There is no doubt that Obama plays the cool front quite well- bounding up staircases in a jaunty jog, offering fist- and chest-bumps with much aplomb, and turning on the hip-hop rhetorical inflection, at will, whenever addressing young voters and ethnic supporters.
Substantively, there is nothing wrong with his playing the “cool card”, up to a point, that is, and now it appears that the President has reached and passed that point- a point of diminishing returns. A recent poll of voters, undertaken across the country, by CNN, has shown that a 53% majority of voters, given the chance to do it over again, say they would have voted for Mitt Romney, instead, by a landslide margin of nine percentage points- the equivalent of an electoral “buyers’ remorse”, if there ever was such a thing.
What does this all mean? It means that it’s okay to play it cool, if you have substance to back it up. However, given the president’s complete lack of leadership on a wide variety of fronts, his coolness comes across as detached aloofness- so symbolic of the man who worked so hard to attain the trappings of office, only to let them slip away in the apparent lack of interest in anything presidential, except raising funds for his Democratic Party allies. While virtually and substantively ignoring domestic and international flashpoints too numerous to count, Barack Obama has overplayed the cool card to the extent that, politically –speaking, he has now left himself out in the cold, and in so doing, created a vacuum of leadership, here at home, and around the world.
-Drew Nickell, 28 July 2014
© 2014 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved