It was an exaggerated news story for about 24 hours, but because it snowballed on mainstream American cable, it cannot be ignored that a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble, Gary Sinise, has been publicly discussed by adult professionals as a potential presidential contender for the GOP’s 2012 ballot.
Sinise has been a more conscientious Hollywood participant than Reagan ever was, he’s more connected to the U.S. military than Rudolph Giuliani or Mitt Romney could ever hope to be, and the theater company he co-founded in the 1970s produced just as many influential American women artists as it did men, a gender balance to which the GOP can’t realistically lay claim. But before it’s made clear why courting Sinise would still be a fool’s errand for the Republican Party, we must first consider how the possibility ever made it into national conversation to begin with.
May 10 on the gossipy commentary Web site The Daily Beast, former McCain staffer Nicolle Wallace wrote a column titled “Waiting for Reagan,” asking a fairly standard open question about where heroism lies in with her party’s leadership; she had the good manners to pontificate on heroism rather than get down on her knees and plead for it. Though her reference to Sinise as a potential contender is only a paragraph long, wholly unofficial (her source is “one Republican I know” who “suggested that actor Gary Sinise might be our savior”) and followed by Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno—both of whom she points out are not even considering running—her suggestion still made headlines.
