A Portrait of the Artist as an Elected Official

Al Franken is only the latest to make the leap.

Not there have been many. And so far, they’ve all been white males and pop-culture entertainers: Sonny Bono. Jesse Ventura. Fred “Gopher” Grandy. Ronald Reagan.

But whether or not voters thought they had brains and depth and governing ability – whether or not voters even thought they had genuine performance skills - these show-biz celebs managed to convince fellow Americans of at least one important thing: That being some (or any) kind of artist shouldn’t exclude a person from civic responsibility and leadership.   

Their success in this may not have the same stirring significance as electing a black man president, but it still marks progress in the struggle to rid Western culture of its self-cheating prejudices. 

For many centuries, artists in the Western world were outcasts. ”Respectable” people lumped actors and dancers with vagrants and prostitutes; painters and composers and jesters toiled as mere servants in the courts of the ruling class. Writers  may have had more luck exerting political influence, but only indirectly - and probably not with poetry and novels.

One artist did rise to absolute power: the Roman emperor Nero. The result? He committed suicide just before he was to be executed. Europe probably didn’t see another artist become head of state until dissident playwright Vaclav Havel was chosen president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and then of the Czech Republic in 1993.

And in the U.S.? A lot of leaders have had some artistic talent – there was  Thomas Jefferson and, um, Thomas Jefferson – but none were professionals until Reagan. And however you want to compare them as political leaders, artistically, Ronald Reagan was no Vaclav Havel.

That’s because Western societies still regard serious artists not just as lowly, but also as weird and unwholesome - creepy intellectuals or (just as bad) head-cases, flakes, limp-wristed idlers, spendthrifts, dipsos, druggies, wastrels and general losers. To get elected in this country, artistic people have had to closely resemble regular guys (and I mean guys literally) who enjoy a laugh and a beer, the kind of people we always seemed to elect until very recently.      

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Franken, a former Saturday Night Live comedian, seems more of an amusement than an artist. But his making it to the Senate has pushed the door open a little wider for less mainstream creative people whose brains, inventiveness, determination and understanding of human nature  America can ill afford to discard. The more citizens of great imagination we have among the powerful, the faster we’ll find fresh ways of handling our problems – and the sooner our society will stop thinking that an artist’s place is in the garret.