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Well, the short answer to the question about Hagel and acting is: he shouldn't quit his day job.
Let's all remember that the last "heavyweight" professional American actor caught "playing" the role of president of the US of A was, of course, Ronald Wilson Reagan. He was the apogee of the presidency as performance art.
But Reagan - paraphrasing Lloyd Bentsen's famous rebuke to Dan Quayle as Quayle invoked John Kennedy's name in debate - was "no Laurence Olivier."
By the standards of the New York stage, to say nothing of London's West End, Reagan was, even with his Tinseltown credits, merely an "enactor."
~ ~ ~
HAMLET. My lord, you played once i' th' university, you say?
POLONIUS. That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.
HAMLET. What did you enact?
POLONIUS. I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i' th' Capitol. Brutus killed me.
HAMLET. It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.
---HAMLET/III,II/Shakespeare
At court in Elsinore, Polonius is regarded as a flatterer and a blowhard. Hamlet kills him by mistake later in the play.
~~~
Ronnie of course was from Illinois, and he really was elected twice. I don't know how many great actors hail from there.
Hagel is from Nebraska. Two good comedians were born in Nebraska: Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett! And then there's old mumbles himself, Marlon Brando of Omaha.
Reagan was more salesman/corporate pitchman than actor, like ... umm, like .. uhhm ... - LIKE WILLARD!
I'll tell you, 'cause I'm familiar with the emotional terrain, Hagel could not have "acted out" his indignation about Iraq.
What he may do now, it seems to me, is worth paying attention to for the simple reason that, as a Vietnam veteran, Hagel is deeply pained about Iraq. That to me is palpable.
The way for an actor, a good actor, to show true emotion in a scene is to be real, to be as real a person in a scene as out of a scene, using emotional memory as a guide.
Chuck Hagel is not a trained actor, but he is a public man. I read the emotions he's expressed on Iraq, emotions which led him to quit the U.S. Senate, as as very real.
