Sorry Mr Obama, but presidents shouldn’t behave like reality TV stars

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/01/obama-reality-tv-vladimir-putin-bear-grylls

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An award-winning golf aficionado and micro-brewer is to appear on reality television as part of a pre-retirement publicity tour. A trip to Alaska, accompanied by Bear Grylls, wouldn’t be the stuff of international news in normal circumstances, but this particular star also happens to be the leader of the free world.

The Nobel peace prize winner responsible for the launch of the largest number of cruise missiles in the award’s history, Barack Obama, will go where Kate Winslet and Zac Efron have gone before, and venture into the wild for entertainment TV. There is already a petition calling on the president to drink his own urine on the show. Viewers will be treated to the undignified sight of a lame duck waddling on ice.

Thanks to Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, American politics already suffers from an excess of macho exhibitionism

The most dismal aspect of this stunt isn’t the lowering of the status of the presidency – as Barack chews raw blubber or spoons Grylls for warmth – but the Putinesque hard-man showmanship. From Australian PM Tony Abbott’s chewing on a raw onion and lycra-clad cycling sessions, to David Cameron’s wild swimming, Vladimir Putin’s continuing mid-life crisis seems to have sparked a trend in global leadership. The submarines, the topless horse riding and the lifting of weights have been lapped up by many of Putin’s countrymen, and it’s this machismo that Obama seems to be trying to channel as he heads to Alaska.

American politics already suffers from an excess of macho exhibitionism. Whether it’s Ted Cruz cooking bacon on the barrel of a gun or Donald Trump mocking John McCain for getting captured during the Vietnam war, Obama’s survival trip adds another chapter to the growing trend of politics becoming like an action movie. Accompanied by a charismatic survival expert named after a woodland camping stove, Obama’s high publicity stunt with Grylls draws attention to the important plight of environmentalism, but it will be too easily dismissed by the doubters as a cheap gimmick. Worse still, those already concerned about climate change would have preferred eight years of quiet achievement to a final, desperate and insubstantial finale.

Whether the final months of the Obama presidency are to be a clip reel of telegenic gloss to distract the nation from gaping holes in his legacy, or just the springboard to the fine orator’s next career, they are hardly what the presidency needs. Trump is already one of reality TV’s biggest stars, and with this move Obama is helping to build a little ladder between Trump Tower and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If the president can jump out of helicopters on television, perhaps the jobs of reality star and statesman are more interchangeable than Trump’s critics would have us believe.

Related: Barack Obama heads to Alaska on mission to highlight climate change

If there is a silver lining to this inglorious trend of athleticism and survivalism in our political leaders, it is that it discriminates against those who seek to campaign while holding a beer glass. Andy Burnham’s pledge to visit more pubs than Nigel Farage is incompatible with his surviving the BBC’s Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week. Unfortunately, the pubby, clubbable middle-aged man jostles for tediousness with the lycra-encased fitness bore.

It would obviously be too much to hope for our politicians to lean on neither gimmick for popularity. Expect to see Jeremy Corbyn on one of those free outdoor gyms near you soon, swinging from the monkey bars in his trademark vest before completing a few rounds of burpees. By 2018 the highlight of the G7 summit could be Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton arm-wrestling in a Brazilian favela while Cameron and Sarkozy play beach football.

Obama is pandering to a trend of politics as entertainment. The Putinesque approach of leaders who behave like stunt men and women is nothing more than a distraction from their failings. Putin’s biceps may get bigger as Russians suffer, and Obama might learn about the fragility of the Alaskan wilderness, but any sensible viewer would rather that, in the last year of his presidency, he received a briefing from behind his desk in the Oval Office, spent the rest of the day doing something about it, and left the urine drinking to Bear. The White House microbrewery can’t be that bad.