COMMENTARY : In ‘Dave,’ the Myth Has a Message : Movies: The character teaches us that ordinary people, who often understand the nation’s woes better than politicians, have a duty to work toward the national interest.

No one should underestimate the power of myth in American politics. Ronald Reagan constructed his public persona from our collective (and historically dubious) images of individual self-reliance in the frontier West--seasoned with a dash of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. In his race for the White House last year, Bill Clinton plugged in directly to the myth of Camelot with the help of a grainy film clip unearthed by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason that symbolically suggested John F. Kennedy passing the torch to Clinton at a Rose Garden ceremony for aspiring young politicos.

Then there’s Ross. Ross Perot last year built his campaign on an even sturdier mythic foundation: the peculiarly American ideal of the citizen-politician--the ordinary person who steps into government and uses some old-fashioned common sense to clean up the mess left by the professional politicians. That ideal’s formidable place in the American psyche is on display again in the new movie “Dave.”

I should admit upfront to something less than impartiality on this film. The screenwriter is a friend. And I play a fleeting part in the movie, as a White House reporter. In the great tradition of political pundits, my character makes a sweeping prediction about an upcoming press conference with absolute certainty. Then, almost immediately, I am proven totally wrong. If nothing else, you’ve got to credit the filmmakers with verisimilitude.

But they’ve got something else right too. This comedy about an average guy who is drafted to impersonate the President--and does a better job than the boorish, reactionary, adulterous incumbent he replaces--is more than a witty romp through Washington. It is another measure of the widespread American conviction that the problem with politics is the politicians. For the audience in the theater when I saw the movie, it required no leap of faith to assume that when drafted to run the country Kevin Kline’s earnest, compassionate, small-business man would make a better President than the two-faced career politician he replaced. To see Dave’s appeal is to understand why Ross Perot attracted almost 20 million votes in his race for the White House last year, even while displaying a weakness for conspiracy theories that surpasses Oliver Stone’s.

Like most enduring American myths, the ideal of the citizen-politician celebrated in “Dave” is by now a tangled mixture of history and Hollywood. Hollywood’s contribution was the classic 1939 Frank Capra film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” The film, which drew howls of protest from pillars of the Washington Establishment upon its release, created a cultural icon in Jimmy Stewart’s accidental Sen. Jefferson Smith--a plain-spoken man who shames his corrupt Senate colleagues and all of Washington’s other wise-guy cynics with his passionate commitment to the common good.

But Capra and screenwriter Sidney Buchman were working with ideas whose roots trace back to the nation’s founding. The founding fathers venerated the citizen-politician, although in a different form than Capra or Perot or “Dave.” For this first generation of American political leaders, men of wealth and culture, the ideal was a consciously elitist one unchanged since ancient Rome: the aristocrat who reluctantly leaves his farm to serve the Republic in an hour of need.

That paternalistic model survived only until the early 19th Century. With his victory in the presidential election of 1828, Andrew Jackson--Old Hickory, the founder of the modern Democratic Party--ended the dominance of the gentlemen politicians. Jackson democratized the historic vision of the citizen-politician, creating the model of the uncomplicated man of action and common sense that still resonates today.

Jackson’s attraction was his populism and “natural” simplicity: It wasn’t Jackson’s opponents but his supporters who described him as an “unlettered man of the West . . . little versed by books” who was “educated in nature’s school.” In office, Jackson applied the principle of “rotation” to federal appointments--turning out entrenched executive branch officials “on the premise that any plain and simple man could do the people’s business,” as one historian wrote. Those arguments entered into American politics the idea underpinning both Perot’s White House bid and the gags in “Dave”: that the real wisdom in our society is found at its base, not its pinnacle.

In the years since, that egalitarian impulse has occasionally soured into a small-minded anti-intellectualism. (Even in 1992, Yale-man George Bush improbably attacked Clinton’s time at Oxford University in England as vaguely un-American.) But the broad cultural consensus that power does not guarantee wisdom--indeed that sustained power almost inevitably blinds officeholders to the plain truths available to ordinary Americans--has infused American public life with a skepticism and receptivity to new ideas and new directions virtually absent from more hierarchical countries like Japan. The majority of this country’s meaningful reform movements--from the populists in the 1890s, to the civil-rights movement of the 1960s--have been rooted in the Capraesque conviction that ordinary people understand the country’s problems and uphold its core beliefs better than the experts and the politicians.

If anything, that sentiment has deepened over the past quarter century as Vietnam, Watergate, the budget deficit and a raft of other scandals and unaddressed problems have corroded public confidence in Washington. It is now commonplace for candidates to base their campaigns for political office on the absence of any previous political experience.

Perot, of course, is the best example. But his presidential campaign was preceded over the past 15 years by a steady flow of businessmen turned office-seekers who painted with Capra’s colors to win governorships in Texas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Kentucky and other states, as well as U.S. Senate seats in Wisconsin and New Jersey; a similar anti-politician appeal could help elect businessman Richard Riordan mayor of Los Angeles next month. The spreading national movement to impose term limits on public officials springs from the same soil--the belief that forcing out professional politicians to make room for more Jefferson Smiths, more Daves, would make the world a better place.

Who’s to say it wouldn’t? The best and the brightest don’t always--or even usually--know what’s best. Who doubts that Congress would be improved by more diversity and greater turnover? Or that naive questions, like those Kevin Kline’s stand-in President poses in “Dave,” sometimes produce the most revealing answers.

The problem is when we suggest--whether in Dave’s gentle satire or Perot’s strident bombast--that our problems remain unaddressed primarily because our careerist professional politicians are out of touch, bought off, or simply lacking in down-home American compassion and horse sense. To extol the citizen and indict the politician lets off the rest of us too easily. Special interests are one problem in Washington but not the only problem. At least as problematic is that Americans have wildly contradictory impulses we refuse to reconcile. We want more in government services than we are willing to pay for in taxes. We want to protect the environment and reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but not to pay more for gasoline. We want to control the exploding cost of health care, but without restrictions on our freedom to see our own doctor, whenever we want. Sending Mr. Smith--or Mr. Perot, or even Mr. Dave--to Washington won’t change any of that.

It’s a great gag when Dave calls in his accountant to prune the federal budget. But the federal budget can’t be balanced simply by eliminating programs we’d all agree are inane. At some level, the accounting problem in Washington is a moral one: What are we willing to sacrifice today to reduce the debt we stick on the next generation?

In his first congressional campaign of 1946, John F. Kennedy pointedly posed that question to a gathering of young Democrats, many of them fellow World War II veterans. In language that anticipated his presidential inaugural address 15 years later, he cautioned these young men against leaving it to others--to the distant government--to build the America they wanted. His generation, Kennedy said, could not separate its own interest from the national interest: It was a group “too large to feel that we have only rights, not duties--too large not to see clearly that it was not for others that we fought, but for ourselves.”

By the end of the movie, Kevin Kline’s Dave has come to the same realization. But until the rest of us do, we’re bound to be frustrated by whoever we elect to run the country.