Meet the Prez

Baird's president-skewering routine went on for minutes (and he won the contest). Capitol Hill's most unabashed impersonator says he works "harrrd" on mimicking the president. "You kind of pick it up," he says. "You lean over the podium like Bush would, pause and act like you're going to say something really profound. But, when it comes out . . ."

Many Moods of George

Bush has that one quality that every president of the modern media has possessed -- he is easy to mimic. But why do we do him? What is it about a crisis-brewing, low approval-rated second term that brings out even more of the presidential impersonator in everyone? It is perhaps the reassurance that we are an essentially ungovernable, sass-back nation of malcontents. Your brother-in-law does a good W., never mind that he staunchly supported him in 2004. Everyone can do him, a little, or an impression of someone else's impression. No form of American political humor cuts closer to the bone than impersonating the president, with all the verbal ticks, mannerisms, faults and foibles exaggerated.

"The court jester really existed, and he was the only person who could be critical without being hung. That same role exists today," says Stephen Rosenfield, director of the American Comedy Institute in New York.

This season's first episode of "Saturday Night Live" found comedian Will Forte again carrying on the show's 30-year tradition of aping the leader of the free world. Forte did a press-conference sketch of a flustered, whiny 43 taking questions on the chin in the Katrina aftermath.

"Let me just speak to the Amerrr-can people about the currrent situation down there in the Gulf. It's gettin' better!" said Forte doing his Bush impression. "When this whole thing started, I was on my usual six-week vacation, like every other American takes. I made the harrrd decision to cut my vacation short."

Forte says impersonation isn't exactly his, uh, forte.

"I don't have the impersonation chops," he says, noting that his Kermit the Frog voice is far better than his Bush. But he relies instead on studying TiVoed CNN broadcasts to capture the president's mannerisms, speech patterns and pacing. "I try to go for the overall feeling instead," he says.

So does Mike O'Meara. On the afternoon Bush introduced John Roberts as his nominee for the Supreme Court, "The Don & Mike Show," heard locally on WJFK-FM, played the president's brief speech as a warm-up for O'Meara's dead-on impression. Gutsy, playing the real thing before parroting the president for an ad-libbed half-hour.

"But you aren't necessarily trying to re-create the most accurate impression," says O'Meara, who also does a decent Arnold Schwarzenegger and Larry King, among others. "You want to create the attitude."

Describing key characteristics of "doing Bush," O'Meara sounds like the president's shrink. "There is the overconfident George Bush, which is one of my favorites, like the day he introduced 'the architect of the campaign,' Karl Rove," says O'Meara, who has been doing presidential impressions since he was 5, when he heard Vaughn Meader's impression of John F. Kennedy. "There's the smug, arrogant Bush I like more than any of them. And there's another one most of us love -- the struggling George Bush, trying to find the right words.

"It is so much fun when you have a president who gives you so much material," he says. "It is really a slice of Americana, comedians doing impressions of presidents."

First Impressions

Will Jordan, who has been doing celebrity impressions since the 1950s (he is known for the definitive Ed Sullivan), is also something of a show-business historian. The earliest presidential impression onstage he has tracked down was a Teddy Roosevelt, done in blackface in Lou Dockstater's minstrel shows, where Al Jolson got his break. In the '30s and '40s, mimics impersonated Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most notable were actor Dean Murphy at New York's post-vaudeville nightclubs, says Jordan, and renowned female impersonator Arthur Blake, who did a sublime FDR when not doing his celebrated Bette Davis at gay clubs.