What’s Not Presidential?

There are certain secular belief systems we just can’t live without.

Human beings simply cannot wake up every morning worrying about whether the gravity will be working all day.

Congress would seize up and perish without assurances of the inevitability of taxes (ours).

And Hollywood would come to a flaming, brick-wall halt if it did not believe utterly that everybody wants to be in Show Biz. In it, of it, around it, smelling it, buying it, selling it, wanting its shine to transfer like so much cat hair.

Exceptions noted: cloistered nuns, enrolees of federal witness protection programs, and now, William Jefferson Clinton.

The President of the United States has a small but juicy--and unwitting--cameo in “Contact,” a summer film that is moderately blessed with both box office and gravitas. And he is having a fit about it. “Fundamentally unfair,” says a White House white-shoe.

What’s the matter, afraid he won’t get good blurbs? Haven’t they read Congressional Quarterly’s film critic gush: “Even a special prosecutor would find the nation’s first Baby Boomer president persuasive and highly believable as the nation’s first interstellar chief exec!”

It must shock Clinton that the Hollywood with whom he has so cozily bundled--the money kind and the Puritan kind--would do this.

He has not studied movie astronomy. There’s the Copernican solar system, everything revolving around the sun, and the Hollywood solar system, everything revolving around MGM. And who’s to say it’s wrong, when a French teenager kills himself because his parents wouldn’t let him get plastic surgery to look like Michael Jackson? Who does the President of the United States think he is, objecting to being in a movie?

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If you haven’t seen “Contact,” allow me to ruin it for you. They’re out there, and they’re calling collect.

“Contact” is based on the late Carl Sagan’s venture from “it is” science into “it might be” science fiction. The “it is” part of “Contact”--various Clinton remarks unrelated to communiques from the star Vega--get “Zeliged” into the film. Clinton is seen to be reasoned, nonspecific, soothing--in short, his usual self. So what’s worrying the White House?

Afraid conspiracy theorists will believe that Jodie Foster actually sits in on NSC meetings? Americans already think extraterrestrials walk among us. I don’t hear Newt Gingrich complaining about being called an alien in “Men in Black,” because if he is one, it’s the best cover he’ll ever have.

Angry at being cut out of the merchandising loop? It’s not enough that he’s president, he wants to be an action figure too? They should have learned from NAFTA to nail down those side agreements.

A White House policy forbids commercial use of the presidency, which in the hands of high-tech could mean the floodgates of Madison Avenue might open next, inundating us with Tylenol commercials smoothly intercutting Clinton confiding that he feels our pain.

Yet this commercial objection comes from the same White House that unwittingly invited a drug trafficker to a White House Christmas party because he made out a check with a lot of zeroes, the same White House that all but posted a “checkout time is noon” card on the door of the Lincoln Bedroom.

Some Beltway wordsmith has once again pulled out of storage the phrase, “incompatible with the dignity of the office.” Some Beltway wordsmith has done so ever since Warren Harding drank bootleg liquor and swived his girlfriend in a White House closet, since Nixon invited “Laugh-In” viewers to “sock it to me,” and since Bill Clinton answered Young America’s questions about his underwear on MTV.

What are the office and the officeholder, if not the same? As the House of Windsor has learned to its grief, how to be human without becoming all too human?

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Mr. President, stop thinking of yourself for a minute.

Think of Bob Dole, who ran a quixotic and vastly expensive campaign, and only got a Visa card gig to show for it.

Think of your celebrity look-alike. How do you expect he feels, losing a terrific role to the real thing? (A true populist would argue it that way, as a full-employment issue, and point out that in using the news video, the director used a scab president.)

Clinton’s quandary is ours. As the weather girl says in “To Die For,” you’re not anybody in this country if you’re not on TV. Better to spend 90 humiliating minutes self-destructing with Sally Jessy than to live 90 years in peaceable obscurity. Everything makes its way to the market, from Ronald Reagan’s million-dollar speechifying to Ted Bundy’s VW.

Forget thinner, he’s not getting any younger. He’ll be, what, 54, when he leaves the White House? There’s a post-presidency at stake, books to write, and books mean TV, TV means talk, and we’re back to Sally/Larry/Oprah again.

What can I say, Mr. President, baby? That’s infotainment.