I tend to think of Bush/Palin/McCain as Ferengi, the species who are (Wikipedia): “characterized by a mercantile obsession with profit and trade and their constant efforts to swindle people into bad deals”

Yes, the redshirt ‘device’ is actually found in scripts. I remember a hysterical play on the concept in the Sci Fi Comedy Galaxy Quest, when Sam Rockwell, playing the character Guy Fleegman, realizes (with great apprehension) that he’s a ‘red shirt’ and is not convinced by Daryl Mitchell’s character that he is the ‘quirky comic relief guy’ rather than the expendable canon fodder.

Sounds like a major improvement compared to the McCain/Palin/Bush – unpredictable Q-like quick and thoughtless responses.

To be fair, McCain does exhibit the honor, courage and warrior qualities of Worf. Good qualities for a soldier, perhaps not deep enough for commander in chief re: foreign policy relations.

As for the resemblance between Barack and Spock (they even rhyme!), I think I was more struck by the similarity in temperament and manner – the way they carry themselves. I would have had little trouble seeing Mr.Spock as the President (although I’m sure there would be some plot-line about how you can’t govern with just the head, but also with the heart – gee, wasn’t that the moral of Metropolis?), and I also could easily see Mr. Obama as a science officer on an away mission, and remember, he’d be wearing a blue shirt, not the infamous security colour that black officers usually wore in the series, leading to the whole redshirt character of Star Trek (and beyond):

A redshirt is a stock character, used frequently in Star Trek, whose primary purpose in the plot of a story is to die soon after being introduced, thus demonstrating the dangerous circumstances faced by the main characters. The term originates from the science fiction television series Star Trek, in which security officers wear red shirts and are often killed on field missions under the aforementioned circumstances.