Presidential doubles

In a small room with a one-way window into the Oval Office, Barack Obama, the newly inaugurated President, and George W Bush, Bill Clinton, and Pappy Bush watched a meeting:

Obama, Bush 1 and 2, and Bill Clinton, were chatting in the Oval Office.

“The resemblance is astonishing,” Obama said.

“Yes,” Pappy said. “The surgeons do good work. And the actors are fully briefed. They do it better than we would. No question about it.”

“So I’m finished,” Obama said.

“All done,” George W said. “You won the election. Now you can relax.”

“Where?” Obama said.

“It’s a beautiful island in the South Pacific,” Pappy said. “A nine-hole course, tennis courts, gardens, servants, the works.”

“But what about our wives?” Obama said. “Don’t they catch on that they’re living with actors?”

“Were any of us having sex with our wives?” Clinton said.

They all laughed.

“The thing is,” Clinton said, “as Presidents, we might have made mistakes and screwed up the political agenda, the timetable, the long-range Plan. Our doubles are taking perfect dictation. They’re fabulous.”

“If it’s time for war, war happens,” Pappy said. “No doubts, no conscience, no reservations. An actor does a much better job than a real person. It’s a general rule.”

Obama stared at his double in the Oval Office.

“He has my smile and laugh down cold,” he said. “He’s good. Hell, he’s great. Where did he come from?”

“We aren’t told the details,” Clinton said. “Need-to-know and all that. Just enjoy it. Letting go is job number one.”

“Is there television on our island?” Obama said.

“You bet,” Clinton said. “You can watch your two terms as President unfold, day by day. It’s fascinating. At first, seeing your double doing his thing, your thing, is strange. You feel a dislocation. But eventually you realize your life, as you knew it, is over. And that’s very liberating. You can live on the island as a new person. You can become somebody else.”

“Who?”

“Your choice. I’m Chuck Tuna.”

“What?”

“It’s a name I cooked up,” Clinton said. “I’m a kind of good old boy hedonist. I’m eating and snacking all day. They bring in beautiful women. The island’s getting a little crowded because, of course, the women can never leave.”

“Pappy and I are writing a combo autobiography,” George W said. “When it’s finished, it’ll go in the private island library. But day to day, I’m Rex Ready, a cowboy who’s just come in off a cattle drive. Every day, I’m coming in. I thought it would get boring, but so far I like it. Dust on my clothes, sweat in my hat, striding into a bar.”

“Maybe I’ll be Tiger Woods,” Obama said. “Of course, a part of me would like to destroy the world in a grand apocalypse and then rebuild it from scratch. I’d appear through a cloud in the sky and lead the way.”

“We’ve got holograms,” Pappy said. “They could fix up something like that for you. I had them do one for me where I outdueled Clinton in the ’92 Presidential debates and won the election in a landslide.”

Clinton chuckled. “Pappy kicked my ass. But in our local poker games, I’m ahead $427 billion.”

“Does it ever get serious on the island?” Obama said.

“Not if we can help it,” W said. “Jimmy Carter started building houses all over the place, and when the rains came, they all fell down. We had to step in and stop him. He’s medicated most of the time now.”

As they watched, the meeting in the Oval Office broke up. The ex-Presidents shook hands and left. The Obama actor was alone. He sat behind his desk staring into space.

He was listening to instructions.

“Okay,” he said. “So Arab Spring comes before Libya, and then Syria?…and then…wait, when does Fast and Furious happen?”

Watching, Clinton frowned. “He’s in trouble,” he said. “Information overload. They’ll have to run him through the Processor again.”

“The Processor?” Obama said.

“The program,” Clinton said. “Sometimes it doesn’t take properly. They do a repeat. Don’t worry, they know how to handle the repairs. It’s standard. When he’s asleep tonight, they’ll hit him with the electromagnetics. Strange as it might seem, the sequence of events during a Presidency is the hardest thing to keep straight.”

Pappy smiled. “My double was once on the verge of telling the American people that the CDC had sent biowar germs to Iraq before Gulf War One. They caught him at the last minute and put him on ice for four days. A little bit of drama. Keeps things interesting.”

A door behind the four Presidents opened. A young man in a suit said, “It’s time to go back to the island, gentlemen. Holiday’s over.”

He held a small weapon in his hand. A ray extended from it and bathed the Presidents in a strange light.

They collapsed on the floor.

A team of men entered and loaded them on to a cart.

The room was an elevator.

It slowly and smoothly descended eight levels below the ground floor of the White House, stopped, and opened.

The men pushed the cart down a long corridor to a well-lit room. There, the Presidents were dragged into a glass-enclosed chamber and connected to life-support tubes.

The chamber darkened for a moment, and then it burst into light and displayed holos of the island. It was in this reality that the Presidents existed.

A minute later, a woman came walking through the corridor, entered the room, and stared at the chamber.

“Hello, Bill,” she said.

Hillary Clinton stood there, relishing the moment.

But also pondering her fate.

To no one in particular, she said, “If I’m the next President of the United States, will I end up here? Will I want to?”

She thought about her life, and like every modern President before her—miserable and wretched in the core of her being—decided that the island might be a welcome relief, a marvelous way to exit and escape from her soul.

“Yes,” she said. “Why not?”

Jon Rappoport