From Walter White to Lyndon B. Johnson, Brian Cranston has his own passage of power

NEW YORK -- Bryan Cranston's break-out role as Walter White, the meth-cooking moral black hole at the center of AMC's "Breaking Bad,'' didn't come until he was 51, after almost 30 years as a working actor. Coming off his run as the culture's most compelling and iconic antihero since Tony Soprano, why choose to play a mere president, in a three-hour play about how a bill gets passed?