Where are you, Dave?

We were talking about New Orleans and President Bush when Karen said, “Do you remember the movie, ‘Dave’?”

“Sort of,” I said. “About a guy who stands in for the President of the United States.”

But I didn’t remember how the story worked, so I looked it up in the Internet Movie Database.

Bill Mitchell is the President of the United States, and not a very upstanding one. He takes care of those who helped him get into office, doesn’t care about the rest of Americans, and he cheats on his wife (Sigourney Weaver), who can’t stand him anyway.

The president wants time alone with his girlfriends. Somebody knows about a temp agency whose owner is a dead ringer for President Mitchell. The president learns of this and has an idea. He has his chief of staff hire the look-alike to impersonate him at various functions such as luncheons and other appearances. The stand-in’s name is Dave.

One day Dave is standing in at a function while the president is in bed with one of his aides. As they are having sex, the president suffers a massive stroke and goes into a coma.

The chief of staff, who is as corrupt as the president, keeps the stroke a secret and talks Dave into impersonating the president full-time. It’s part of a plot the chief of staff has hatched to make himself president when it’s all over.

But Dave winds up liking the job, and he is good at it, conscientious and fair and good-hearted, etc. He does things that start to make the country a better place, and the country notices. Plus he starts to fall in love with the First Lady . . . .

I stopped my research there, because I want to rent the movie (Warner Bros., 1993) and watch it again. Karen liked the idea, and the concept.

“We need a Dave,” she said.

She has a point. For more than a week, the same words have been running through my head, over and over. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

I said to Karen, “I wonder if Alfred E. Neuman is available.” I had been thinking about Alfred since the week of the hurricane. Alfred is the familiar spokesperson for Mad Magazine, he strongly resembles the president, and his credo is, “What, me worry?” When President Bush flew over New Orleans on the Wednesday of the hurricane, and kept right on going, past the biggest leadership opportunity of a president’s life, I believed surely that Alfred E. Neuman had somehow occupied his body.

But Neuman wouldn’t be the one. Too many Neuman-Bush comparisons already exist on the Web, and people would easily figure out the switch. No, we need a Dave, and we need him without anything bad happening to the president. We need a group to make the president a nice, comfortable exile offer he can’t refuse, like the conservative right. I seriously think if anyone is worried about Bush these days, it is the group that has placed its agenda in his hands. I know I don’t feel good about a president who demonstrably cannot tell “a heck of a job” from a cheese enchilada, and I am not even counting on him for anything. The neocons are counting on him for everything. They need a Dave.