Geena Davis is not my president: the bipartisan romance with the imperial presidency comes to prime time.

• Author: Healy, Gene
• Position: Commander in Chief - Television Program Review

ABC's HIT DRAMA Commander in Chief focuses on the personal and political challenges faced by our fictional first female chief executive, played by Geena Davis. What's interesting about the show isn't the idea of a woman president, and it certainly isn't the hackneyed dialogue. If Commander in Chief is worth watching at all, it's for what it tells us about modern, popular views of presidential power.

Commander in Chief is the brainchild of Rod Lurie, whose previous foray into political drama was The Contender (2000). In that film, Joan Allen played the scandal-tarred Sen. Laine Hanson, fighting for confirmation as the nation's first female vice president. Lurie's politics are reflected in Hanson's confirmation speech before the Senate, in which she calls for taking "every gun out of every home, period" and "making the selling of cigarettes to our youth a federal offense" before descending into unvarnished state worship and dubbing Congress her "church."

Thus far, the politics of Geena Davis' Mackenzie Allen have been more difficult to discern. This may be because they consist of convictions shared by both parties, such as dedication to a militarized drug war and a hyper-Wilsonian foreign policy that sees all the world's quarrels as our own.

In Episode I, just after ascending to office, President Allen meets with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to decide what to do about a woman in Nigeria who's about to be executed under Shariah law for adultery. The answer: Send in the Marines. After a threat to its ambassador, the Nigerian government relents, and we see the prisoner running to the rescue helicopter flanked by American soldiers as President Allen delivers the line, "I will always defend the Constitution." (A commentator at National Review Online approves, giving Mac's decision a "You go, girl.")

Leave it to Lurie to make the GOP look good again. In Episode 3, as Mac Allen gets ready to launch her second military action in as many days, she makes a courtesy call on her nemesis, Republican Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton, played with charmless creepiness by Donald Sutherland. She tells Templeton of her plan to capture Noriega clone "General Sanchez," the dictator of "San Pascuale," who has been complicit in the deaths of six American drug enforcement agents. Templeton complains about the frequency of post-Cold War military campaigns and pointedly asks how many of them have been worth "spilling American blood." He also notes...