THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE

By LANCE MORROW

FOR A DAY OR TWO AFTER COLIN POWELL DECLINED TO enter the presidential race, many Americans felt an irritated deflation, followed by a wave of what might be called Scarlett O'Hara syndrome--a pining for the Ashley Wilkes we cannot have.

It is a surreal development in the American electorate's psychology that Powell should be the Ashley Wilkes in this piece, the unavailable paragon. (Pursuing the analogy too far is tough, since it involves transforming either Bob Dole or Bill Clinton into Rhett Butler.) As Powell's case shows, the romance of the withheld is powerful. Scarlett wanted Ashley because she could not have him. Human nature yearns for--idealizes--what is placed out of reach: Lycidas, the hero who dies in youth; Camelot, the bright, magic might-have-been. A politics of Zen--the most powerful presence is someone who isn't there.

The flip side is to denigrate what we have, a variation on Groucho Marx's refusal to belong to any club with such low standards that it would have him for a member. Abraham Lincoln in 1860 entered polite America's imagination cartooned as an ungainly ape, an uncouth backwoods savage. In the 1932 election campaign, even some liberals appraised Franklin Roosevelt as a feckless mama's boy from the silver-spoon Hudson River gentry, a man without character or principles. "An amiable Boy Scout," wrote Walter Lippman.

The dynamic is almost always the same. In the 1940s Harry Truman, a hero President in today's myth, came onstage as a moral-cultural-intellectual nonentity, the strutty little haberdasher of Independence, Missouri, ridiculously trying to fill the shoes of Franklin Roosevelt, who was of course by that time a god.

How did the presidential prospects look in 1960? Tricky Dick Nixon vs. the untried, unproved Palm Beach and Hyannis playboy whose ruthlessly amoral millionaire father Joe Kennedy was out to buy the presidency for his kid. Great choice.

It is an exceptional election when Americans are not lamenting "How did we come to this?" In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was a drawling Texas mess we inherited after ex-playboy J.F.K. was martyred into his golden nimbus. Johnson's opponent Barry Goldwater was a thermonuclear psychotic. So thought everyone to the left of Mayor Daley.

A mordantly juvenile ditty circulating in Nelson Rockefeller's campaign headquarters in 1968 insulted every hopeful in sight: "Scranton's a sissy,/ Nixon's a prick./ Romney's a moron,/ Goldwater's sick./ Nelson's your best man,/ Able and quick./ But who is our candidate?/ Upright Dick!" After Nixon's Inauguration, even the Washington Post's cartoonist Herblock gave him a shave (erasing the famously sinister Milhousian stubble shadow). Whatever else Nixon may have become in the years before his forced retirement, he was deemed for an instant to be presidential. Every President, including Bill Clinton, has a hard fight to live up to the adjective; even more difficult is attaching the word to a candidate.

In the 1870s Henry Adams wrote that all you have to do to disprove Darwin's theory of evolution is chart the course of the American presidency from George Washington to Ulysses Grant. Downhill Darwin: a century later the process would yield a choice between a south Georgia peanut farmer and a washed-up Hollywood actor.

Henry Adams was right, although what he regretted was, in a sense, democracy itself, and the vulgarities and mediocrities that come with its expansion. Like marriage, the presidential selection process is an irrational gamble. It begins in the fumbling courtship of the primaries, with romantic illusions and disillusions, and it makes its gaudy and touching way to consummation a year or so later on the west front of the U.S. Capitol. America is a serial monogamist. The Presidents we get are just about what we can expect or hope for in a role that is supposed to be ideal but in truth demands to be improvised as it goes along.

Anyone past adolescence knows what moral to draw from the Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes story: Keep your dreams if you like (though Ashley may turn out to be to be a jerk when deprived of his chivalric mystique), but work with what you have--which Scarlett, God knows, did. Americans get the Presidents they exert themselves to deserve. That may or may not be a good thing; it is a mistake to get prissy about it. Selflessness shades into self-righteousness. If Presidents are chosen by the exertions of selfless zealots, the process may prove dangerously unrepresentative.

There is a deeper moral embedded in Colin Powell's decision. It has to do with the sight, unexpected in politics, of a sane man being true to himself--unaffectedly displaying an integrity that has a faraway feel, like Frank Capra movies from the '30s. In the '90s politics and entertainment have completed a merger through media--an unwholesome synthesis that produces a whole circus of falsifications and unrealities, a kind of drug dream. The drug is power, that stimulant and hallucinogen. Even with the highest office in the world apparently available to him ("The first black ."), Powell remained comfortably within himself. It was there for the taking, and Powell did the mysteriously beautiful thing. He abstained.