After a few decades as a church and lost to fire in 1862, John Ford rebuilt the theater and opened it to great fanfare in 1863. The lavish venue was the place to be seen in wartime Washington society. The crowd at Ford’s Theater that evening of April 14, 1865 was there to hopefully see the nation’s newest, hottest hero, General Ulysses S. Grant, who had that week accepted the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at the Appamattox Court House just five days earlier. Grant and his wife were expected to accompany the President and Mrs. Lincoln to Ford’s, but had already left town. Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax was also reportedly invited but declined. The Lincolns were finally joined by Ms. Harris and Major Rathbone, and all took their seats in history.

John Ford was confined in the Old Capitol prison for 39 days while authorities investigated any complicitiy in the plot (there was none determined). On the day that Booth’s conspirators were hanged until dead, Ford gamely tried to re-open his gorgeous but tarnished theater, but he demurred at the violent outcry from the public.

An appalled and grief-stricken Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, vowed that the theater should never exist again as a house of gaiety and entertainment, and seized the building for the government. He wanted all evidence of this house of death and human tragedy erased from memory. All trappings of Ford’s as a place of merriment were scoured from the building, moving his War Department’s Record and Pension Bureau in. From that day forward it would be a theater of the mundane.

As every memorable act has a curtain call. so did tragedy come out for an encore at the erstwhile Ford’s on June 9, 1893, when an upper story bursting with pension documents and office equipment gave way, killing 22 persons and injuring 68..

Thanks to a filthy, kneecapping media blitz that makes the Hillary-Barack dustup look like Our Town and a singularly inept campaign by Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988 beat considerable odds and accomplished the notable feat of being the first sitting Vice President since Martin Van Buren in 1836 to ascend to the Presidency.

In his fabulous and exhaustive account of the 1988 Presidential campaign, 1992′s What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer introduces us to “The Bubble” and explains why sitting Vice Presidents make such awful and unsuccessful Presidential candidates.

He tells the story of Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush visiting the Houston Astrodome to throw out the first pitch in the National League Championship Series between the Houston Astros and the New York Mets on October 8, 1986. This wasn’t a man-of-the-people meet-and-greet. This was a Vice Presidential Event.

“So George Bush is coming to the Astrodome,” Cramer writes. “The thing is, it couldn’t just happen. George Bush couldn’t just fly in, catch a cab to the ballpark, get his ticket torn, and grab a beer on the way to his seat. No, he had come too far for that.”

The massive logistics that had to be considered and implemented had been in play for two months, since the Director of Advance in the Office of the Vice President told the White House Military Office to secure Air Force Two and Air Force Two’s backup for the event. They had to coordinate with the squadron at Andrews Air Force Base for a Special Air Mission. An Air Force transport plane had to fly in new communications and Secret Service equipment for the Astrodome. The Air Force Vice Chief of Staff in charge of Special Air Missions had to assign this Vice Presidential event, or Volant Silver (a Presidential event of this nature would be a Volant Banner), to the Military Airlift Command.

The first order of business at the Astrodome was to decide what kind of event this was going to be. “Sure, it’s a first-ball thing, but where would he make the throw?…The mound?…The (Secret) Service didn’t want him exposed on the field like a baited goose. Did (Astros’ owner Dr. John) McMullen want his 44,000 fans held at the gates and frisked for metal?…Absolutely not.”

A dozen Secret Service advance men would spend the next two days walking over every foot of ground that the Vice President would pass. The three air conditioners that he would walk past were dismantled and completely inspected for anything out of the ordinary. None of this accounted for the media preparations that had to be put in place. All of this for a 60-second event.

Vice President Bush was completely oblivious to the operational tornado that would precede his arrival, just as he’d been for every Vice Presidential Event he’d attended for the previous six years. He would arrive with his motorcade, be led to where he was supposed to be, and do what he was supposed to do. He had some clue, but it had been going on so long that it was as routine to him as our morning commute is for any of us. The advance teams did everything they could to remove any element of spontanaeity or surprise from this briefest of events–you know, the kinds of things that happen when people get together in public places. The important thing was that the Vice President was secure and comfortable. “Those were the twin imperatives in the Vice Presidential motorcade…They were the givens of his life, along with the thousands of hours of unseen labor by others. In this case, some 400 people, a couple hundred thousand dollars, and a couple hundred million dollars in government equipment got the Vice President to the ball game in perfect security, and comfort.

“This is living in the bubble, and George Bush had long since perfected the art. By this time, midway through his second term, he had almost ceased to notice the special circumstances of his being. After almost six years as Vice President, the bubble was his milieu…No one who hadn’t lived in the bubble could know what it was like: a trip of a thousand miles, two thousand, or more, across a continent, around the globe, without one word exchanged with a stranger; a year, two years, four years, without driving a car, without being allowed to drive a car; instead, the hush of the limousine and the silent smile from the Service man at the wheel; the stewards in the plane, hovering to know his pleasure.”

It’s no small thing to run for higher office and still be able to connect to real people. It would seem almost an impossibility after four or eight years as Vice President of the United States. One need look no further than last week when Vice President Dick Cheney told Martha Raditz, “So?”, when she noted that more than two-thirds of all Americans were opposed to continued involvement in Iraq. It’s a little different when a war is all numbers on a briefing paper and it isn’t your kids getting ripped apart by IEDs.

For all the ridiculing of Obama’s incessant call for “change”, Americans want to elect a President who has some clue of what they go through every day. George H.W. Bush had no clue of what it’s like to shop at Home Depot or go to Sam’s Club because the beer’s cheaper. Even worse, he looked at his watch during the Town Hall debate with Bill Clinton, as if he was bored with the gripes of the Great Unwashed.

Populism takes different forms, and George Bush was probably elected in part because of the perception that he was an affable but flawed human like most Americans, and that resonated. That’s why his drunk driving arrest from 1976 that came out days before the election didn’t hurt his poll numbers a bit. Yes, he was a child of privilege, but he had a baseball team and he used to be an alcoholic and he was a little sloppy in his personal responsibilities. He wasn’t the smartest kid in the class like Al Gore, with his Green evangelism and his smarmy “I invented the Internet” claptrap (of course, what was lost in all the character assassination was that Al Gore actually served in Vietnam).

More than a small number of Americans voted for Bill Clinton because they knew, unspokenly, that he knew what it was to pay for a lap dance. I don’t know if Barack has ever paid for a lap dance, but he did cocaine and weed when he was in his disco suit period in the late 1970s. John McCain paid for lap dances and more on leave before he was taken Prisoner of War and after he returned to the U.S. Hillary doesn’t know it if she hasn’t closely checked her credit card statements, but on at least one joint card I’m sure she’s unwittingly paid for a handful of lap dances, which doesn’t really count, but she’s had to wrestle with Bill’s infidelity and the quandary of whether or not to set his last night’s clothes on fire rather than wash them after he tosses them in the hamper smelling like someone else’s perfume.

We’ve got no incumbent running this year, and that’s no doubt a good thing for our democracy. Power corrupts, and insular power corrupts insularly. The three candidates remaining have spent just enough time out of the bubble that they have an idea of what it’s like to carry your own lunch to work. I think I’m voting for the guy with the cocaine history and the Tony Manero suit.

Regardless of your political persuasion, I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: If Barack Obama is elected President, Michelle Obama is going to become the First Lady of Most Smokin’ Umber Hotness.

I’m proud to be an American, because–no offense to Laura Bush and her pursed, puckery, judgmental librarian lips–if Barack Obama wins, we’re going to have the hottest executive wife in the world (okay, Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife is a definite babe–but she slept with Mick Jagger and Donald Trump. That’s the kind of Ick Factor that’s worth 100 Beauty Demerits).

Of course, if Hillary wins, we’ve got Bill, which is another discussion entirely.

If John McCain wins…well, we’ve got Cindy McCain as David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth.

But do full hips, smoky eyes, and sultry Diana Ross hotness really an ideal First Lady make? What does it take to be a top-shelf First Lady, and how have some of the 42* that will precede Michelle Obama measured up? After all, except for Michelle, we can’t assess a First Lady’s worth by how she looks in a bikini and curled up on a bearskin rug. And, no disrespect to Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan, but we shouldn’t. Ever. Seriously. (I thought Kitty Dukakis had her own kind of hot going on, and would have made a great First Lady. And when she was hospitalized for a drinking relapse after consuming isopropyl alcohol, I thought that displayed both a vulnerability and a resourcefulness that just made her even more tantalizing in a Mrs. Robinson/Virginia Woolf sort of way to my then-young-twentysomething self).

No, there are non-physical tangibles at work that measure the worth of a First Lady. How do they stand by their man, and how do stand on their own? Are they activist or passivist? Do they have mettle or meddle? Do they spend their time trying to make America a better place for America, or their husband’s administration a better place for their hair-trigger intolerances? And what would they do if they caught their husband sticking a cigar in an intern’s vajayjay? Let’s start by taking a look at America’s last six Chief Executive Wives.

LAURA BUSH: How does she stay with the man? She’s a librarian. She’s actually read the books that are on the shelves around her. She should have some reverence for the mother tongue that would compel her conscience, to make her walk far away from this man who treats the English language like Tex Watson treated Leno LaBianca. For blind loyalty alone, she should earn a C- but that’s not entirely fair. She’s conducted herself with unimpeachable dignity (as opposed to her husband, who has conducted himself with apparently unimpeachable indignity) and doesn’t do a lot of shrill politicking about who should and shouldn’t be in her husband’s administration, so, in the interests of fairness: B

HILLARY CLINTON: In her bull-in-the-china-shop arrogance, she botched any chance she had to reform health care, and ostracized a Democratic Congress that might have passed her plan. She stood by Bill during his infidelities–before, during, and, probably, after the White House, which only wins her points for fortitude. Sort of. After August 18, 1998, she and Chelsea should have left the White House with all their stuff piled into a Ford Aerostar and hit the road with the title song from “Alice” as their theme music. Her current spurious claims for effecting world peace during the 1990s notwithstanding, she did travel the world as an effective and vocal ambassador. Still, I can’t believe she didn’t Lorena Bobbitt Bill a long time ago. C

BARBARA BUSH: Yes, she taught a handful of children to read a handful of words. She might have been right when she said of Gerry Ferraro “it rhymes with rich.” But her otherwise-horrible attitude is still being amplified nearly sixteen years after she left the White House. There was her regal assessment of the Katrina refugees living in barely-contained squalor in the Astrodome that “well, some of them are much better off than they were before.” She said two days before the start of Gulf War II, “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it’s gonna happen and how many this or that or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it’s not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” And how many kids your son is sending to get shredded by IEDs. She is Marie Antoinette, but we’ll have to wait for history to cut her head off. F

NANCY REAGAN: Shrill and controlling, she was a tiny terror to the Reagan staff, and it was often her decision alone whose heads would roll. She had her own astrologist to shape the President’s schedule. She brought a gawdy plutographic opulence to the White House that was responsible for Dynasty being around as long as it was, and added absolutely nothing to the public good–she didn’t get me to “just say no”; that little I do remember from the 1980s. A mean little harpie. D-

ROSALYN CARTER: Extra points for enduring Billy as a brother-in-law. Between her efforts on behalf of mental health and Habitat For Humanity, she’s done more charitable work than I’ll ever read about, all the while being a thoroughly inoffensive and unobtrusive personality. You just can’t compete with that. A

BETTY FORD: Now this is one tough lady. Even through a good-sized drinking and pain pill problem, she fought for the Equal Rights Amendment and battled breast cancer, and became one of the first activists for breast cancer awareness. After she sobered up, her Betty Ford Center became a whole new vacation industry for the Liza Minellis and Elizabeth Taylors of the world. A

*James Buchanan, 15th President and only bachelor to serve in the nation’s top seat. Murmurs were that he had the gay.