Jeff Greenfield at Slate offers a timely new unified theory of American presidential politics based on the work of Chuck Jones. In a nutshell: American politicians are divided between those who remind voters of Bugs Bunny and those who remind them of Daffy Duck. "As shaped by genius animator Chuck Jones — he didn't create the Warner Bros. icons, but he gave them their later looks and personalities — Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries... Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor." JFK was a Bugs, Nixon a Daffy; Ronald Reagan, a Bugs, Jimmy Carter a Daffy (who, as if in some Biblical prophecy, prepared for the 1980 contest by being attacked by a rabbit.) Some partisans may detect cracks in the argument. Greenfield identifies the current incumbent as a "Bugs Bunny", but do either Al Gore or John Kerry match up with Daffy Duck, as described by Greenfield: "He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury," responding to every setback with "a sibilant sneer"? (Personally, I always associated Kerry with Bullwinkle. But maybe dragging in characters from Jay Ward Productions would demand a whole other set of rules.) And while there may be something to the idea that George W. Bush seems more "at ease, laid back, secure, confident" than his adversaries, it will come as some news to the United Nations that "he never flails at his opponents or at the world" — and perhaps a bit of a belated shocker to everyone else that "he knows the way things work." (Me, I'd say that Bush was more like that manic little dog who used to follow Spike the bullddog around, looking like he was about to piss himself, babbling non-stop about how they were gonna find some cats and put the smackdown on them. Spike, of course, was Dick Cheney.)
In Greenfield's analysis — and he must be right, he does this for a living — Hillary Clinton is a Daffy, Barack Obama a Bugs. "When Clinton insisted that Obama not simply 'denounce' Louis Farrakhan but 'reject him,' Obama shrugged. Well, he said, I don't really see any difference, but if you think there is, I reject and denounce. Indeed, throughout the debate, Obama leaned back and asked for time with the flick of a finger, as if summoning a waiter for another bottle of wine. Clinton, meanwhile, leaned forward, pushing her points with grim determination." So that should give Obama an edge in the general election when he faces John McCain, who is as Daffy as they come. But if Clinton should prevail, then come November, we will have the awesome, perhaps scary spectacle of two Daffys locked in a winner-take-all battle for supremacy. Worlds will collide in a way that Chuck Jones never dared to imagine.