Whether it is the earnest Josiah Bartlet from The West Wing or the manipulative Frank Underwood in House of Cards, US television watchers prefer television presidents to their real-life chief executive, US President Barack Obama.
A Reuters-Ipsos poll taken this month found 54 percent of respondents held an unfavorable opinion of Obama, while 46 percent were favorable.
In contrast, asked to imagine that David Palmer of 24 was president, 89 percent of those who had seen the Fox counterterrorism drama said they held a favorable rating of the decisive president played by Dennis Haysbert.
Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet of The West Wing — beloved by Democrats, including many who work in Obama’s White House — was rated favorably by 82 percent of its NBC viewers.
In the dark universe of Battlestar Galactica on SyFy, President of the Twelve Colonies Laura Roslin, played by Mary McDonnell, drew a 78 percent favorable rating among fans of her quest to find Earth and escape the Cylons, a race of humanoid killer robots.
With US voters divided along partisan lines, it is unlikely that any real-life president could achieve sky-high favorability ratings, said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and author of What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted, a study of popular culture in the White House.
“Pretty much half the country is going to be predisposed against you just because that’s the way we line up with Republicans and Democrats,” said Troy, who was a top domestic policy adviser in former US president George W. Bush’s Republican administration.
Frank Underwood also beat Obama.
In House of Cards, Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, kills a passed-out member of the US Congress by leaving him in a running car in a garage, and pushes a journalist in front of a subway train.
Imagining Spacey’s scheming character as president, 57 percent of respondents who have seen the Netflix political thriller said they held a favorable opinion of him.
Even Obama likes Underwood.
“This guy’s getting a lot of stuff done,” Obama quipped during a December 2013 White House photo-op with Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive.
“I wish things were that ruthlessly efficient,” Obama said.
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