US Elections

Presidents, Political Leaders, and Popular Culture

By Erin Riley in Sydney

7 December 2009

---

John Adams, the award-winning miniseries about the second president of the United States, was on SBS last night. It’s a powerful telling of the life of John Adams, his involvement in the founding of the United States, and his time as President of the United States.

It’s amazing, though, how often American presidents and political leaders feature in popular culture. Sometimes, like in the Adams mini-series, they are the subjects of the narrative. Sometimes they simply feature, fleetingly, in another story. American popular culture had a place for it’s political leaders, and they pop up in all sorts of unexpected places. It's one thing for someone like Barack Obama to appear in songs and stories, it's something else entirely for historical political figures to be part of popular culture.

Like last year, when I was watching an episode of the TV show How I Met Your Mother with some friends, and it came to a scene where Marshall was making charts. Among his many other charts, he had one “Ten Dirtiest President’s Names”. He only read the first few, but if you paused it, you could see the whole list. It was one of the funnier jokes the show has ever told.

I think what made it so funny was the way the names people knew and knew well were taken and put into a context that made them funny. It hints at the significance of American political leaders in American popular culture. One can hardly imagine Sir Henry Parkes similarly popping up in an Australian comedy…

My favourite appearance of an American political leader is, by far, in a video I came across a few weeks ago, from the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word. It features Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the Broadway musical In The Heights, performing a song he wrote about Alexander Hamilton. Check it out:

I’m sure the way American political leaders show up in popular culture demonstrates something about American politics. Does it inherently involve aspects of celebrity? And has it always? Or is this something that has evolved, and as American politicians have become more like celebrities, so too have historical political figures?

Print This Post