POLITICS WATCH : Reality Check

When astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, some Americans might have wondered whether they were seeing a simulation. They weren’t. Armstrong actually took his “one small step for a man.” His “one giant leap for mankind” left real boot prints on the real moon.

And yet, who can blame those Americans who wondered at the time? The United States is, after all, the country that has made a fine art of “special effects.” Is this a real earthquake or are we at Universal Studios?

Special effects can be a trick we play on ourselves. It can never have been literally true that “only her hairdresser knows for sure.” Obviously, she herself had to know too, but she may have liked pretending that she didn’t.

This being the case, the news that the Bush Administration has built a simulated Oval Office next door to the real one--a stage set from which both President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle can do “Oval Office” interviews--strikes us as no cause for high dudgeon. It is, if you will, news about the Republic rather than news about the Republican Party.

All the same, we receive this news with a small sigh. Angelenos know, better than the residents of most cities, that film crews can get in the way of real work.

It may make good, eminently practical sense to have one Oval Office in which to be President and another in which to be “presidential.” And yet something old-fashioned in us resists turning the White House into a special effect. The real Oval Office, like the real President, ought to be enough.