Perhaps because he is poorer than almost everyone he knows, Mr Mount casts himself from an early age more as an observer than as a protagonist.
In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Satan asks Jesus to turn stones to bread, cast himself down from the Temple so that angels will rescue him, and accept, in return for worshiping the devil, rule over the world's kingdoms.
That awkward fact prompted Mr. Obama, who has cast himself as largely free from the normal influences of politics, to express regret over what he called his own bad judgment.
In their final confrontation before the nation's voters last night, Vice President Al Gore cited accomplishments throughout his public career as evidence that he is a champion of working Americans, while Gov. George W. Bush cast himself as a leader from outside Washington with a record of uniting Republicans and Democrats.
As a candidate, he cast himself as the scrappy kid from Scranton who is one of the least-wealthy members of the Senate, fighting for cops and firefighters and teachers.
But, though Whitman "cast himself as a poet-prophet from the start of his career," Robertson writes, he never fully embraced the role of spiritual leader: the intense relationships he maintained with his followers seem to have been motivated largely by a love of flattery.
He did not go so far as to cast himself in the Walter Matthau role from the film of the great Neil Simon play, nor did he accuse Cowan, as Oscar Madison disparaged Jack Lemmon's Felix Ungar, of being "the only man in the world with clenched hair", yet there was enough truth in the simile for it to resonate.
By choosing Gore as his running mate in 1992 — by, in effect, doubling the Southern element of his candidacy — Clinton was casting himself off from the party of George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Mario Cuomo.
'Are you guys actresses or models?' Downey's character asks, suddenly casting himself as a producer from Malibu, while Penn's character has begun to beat the second girl to death with a rock.
In "Latin History for Morons," which first played at the Public Theatre in the spring, he casts himself as "ghetto scholar," sprinting from the Aztecs to Sonia Sotomayor in less than two hours — with dance breaks.
