Writing in Newsweek, Joshua Alston reflects on the history of fake black presidents and woman presidents in the movies and on TV, a lineage that may have greased the way for the real-life battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It's sobering to realize that the very notion of a woman or an African-American becoming president has, until recently, been treated mostly as a subject for comic or something close to science fiction, as in the 1964 movie Kisses for My President, which is all about how emasculating it is for Fred MacMurray to be cast in the role of First Husband after his wife, Polly Bergen, is elected president. Bergen eventually resigns the presidency to answer to what the film sees as a woman's higher calling: she's pregnant, and her family needs her. At least she was actually elected. The first black president in the movies, Douglass Dilman, played by James Earl Jones in the 1972 The Man (adapted, from an Irving Wallace novel, by that exemplar of socially conscious entertainment, Rod Serling), rose to the office after a perfect storm hit the line of succession. He just happened to be the President Pro Tempore of the Senate when both the president and the speaker of the house are killed by a collapsed roof in West Germany. After the ailing, elderly vice-president politely declines the job because he already has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, the cabinet actually urges the secretary of state to ignore the rules and jump ahead of Dilman; he turns them down (no Al Haig he), but The Man remains rooted firmly in the concept that a black man could become president only through a surreal set of circimstances and that much, if not most of the country would balk at regarding his presidency as legitimate. At the end, Dilman is planning to fight to hang onto the job (no Polly Bergen he), but in order to demonstrate that white America can trust him to govern in "moderation", he has to turn over a black revolutionary (Georg Stanford Brown) to the apartheid government of South Africa.
A lot has changed since then, but as recently as 2003, the Chris Tucker-Bernie Mac movie Head of State was predicated on the idea that a black president was both unlikely and hilarious, and more recently than that, the TV series Commander in Chief, in which Geena Davis ascended to the president after the guy who was elected at the top of the ticket suffered a cerebral aneuryam, earned a fair number of perplexed and hostile notices just for its premise. On the other hand, that show also set off a fair amount of tsk-tsking and throat-clearing among people who were appalled to discover how many people still felt comfortable with expressing dismay at the very concept of a woman president; in that sense, Commander in Chief may have been more successful at propelling the debate into, say, the twentieth century than it was as entertainment. Of course, the real triumph may be in Jack Bauer's alternate universe. 24, a show frequently criticized as right-wing propaganda (and one that premiered in the fall of 2001, shortly after Everything Changed), began with David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) campaigning for the presidency and wound up with him becoming first leader of the free world, then a martyr, and finally, with his little brother following him to the Oval Office, as the head of a dynasty. In the next season, Cherry Jones is set to play the first woman president who'll be telling Jack who to blow up next. The show has had its share of white male presidents, too, but they have tended to be a far less inspiring lot. After the last one, the Nixonian President Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin), Jack Bauer might not ever have take orders from another white guy again.