I could run for President.

     My 35th birthday is coming up soon, and I haven't quite decided how I feel about that yet.  For the most part I don't think I really have to form a solid opinion about it because it's going to happen no matter what I think about it.  Still, it is a bit of a milestone birthday, so I figure I ought to at least acknowledge this one.  Since I can't decide whether I want to celebrate the fact that I'm getting older or not I thought maybe I should celebrate something about this anniversary of my birth that definitely is a positive thing.  Turns out that there aren't a whole lot of guaranteed positives to turning 35, but I did come up with one- I could run for President if I wanted to!  It's a stretch, I know, but seriously it's always good when you have one more option available to you regardless of whether you want to use it or not.

No way in hell would I ever run for President of course- from everything that I've seen it looks like the President has to spend entirely too much time wearing pants for that to be a dream of mine- but I can go ahead and indulge in some fantasies about what I would want to do if I were to suck it up about the all the time pants thing and run for/win the job.  I mean, come on, I'm a total politics junkie so it's inevitable that I've got at least a few ideas.  Probably a scary amount of ideas that will turn this into a book that nobody is every going to read instead of a blog post that no one is ever going to read.  Maybe so many ideas that I'll get bored with thinking about them all and trying to type them all out, and I'll give up and leave this unpublished when I move on to something else.

So, let's see.  How to go about this in an organized fashion?  I could just make it a listicle with cute pictures and a slide show or something with an eye towards making it funny, but that's not really my style at all.  I don't even know how to do the slide show thing, nor do I have any interest in finding out how to.  I could just start typing and see what comes out, but past experience has taught me that can lead to some really weird and convoluted results.  I suppose I ought to figure out just what I think the President's job is supposed to be and then go from there.

Luckily there's this handy dandy reference guide called the US Constitution that I can use as a jumping off point.  Here's a link in case anybody wants to read it, but I'm not going to add the text of the whole thing cause it's pretty long and I'm verbose enough on my own:  The Constitution.  Specifically it's Article II that deals with the President, and I will take a minute to summarize what his or her job is according to this most important of documents.  Let me start by saying that most of this is stuff the President can do, not necessarily stuff they have to do.  First, the President is in charge of the military, except for the National Guard because they belong to the individual states, unless the Guard is needed for something outside of the country, in which case the President becomes their boss too.  Second, he or she is given the authority to make the heads of different departments share their opinions about the stuff their department handles with him or her.  This implies that there are supposed to be different departments that handle stuff, but it's a little unclear as to what any of those departments are or whether they actually fall under the control of the President.  It almost sounds like the departments are supposed to be run independently and make their own policies as long as they keep the President up to date on what they are doing if he or she wants to know.  Third, the President gets to issue pardons and reprieves to people convicted of violating Federal laws.  So he or she can hand out get out of jail free or let's pretend this never happened cards.

The Constitution starts a new paragraph here, so I think I will too.  Next up the President is supposed to make treaties with the leaders of other countries and then ask members of Congress whether 2/3 of them approve of the terms in that treaty.  Fifth, the President is supposed to appoint people do jobs like Ambassadors and Supreme Court Justices.  He or she can also fill government jobs that are supposed to be filled by Congress or somebody else temporarily if the job is left unfilled when Congress or whoever was supposed to fill it heads off on vacation.  Sixth, the President has to report to Congress at least once a year about the State of the Union and offer his or her suggestions as to what Congress needs to be working on while they meet.  Seventh, The President has to receive representatives of other countries who want to meet with someone for the purpose of doing business with the United States or discussing how to deal with issues that affect both countries by taking actions inside or outside of the US.  Eighth, The President gets to order Congress back into session to keep working if there is something that they really need to be doing that they've dropped the ball on because they can't come to an agreement about it.  There's something mentioned near the end of Article II about granting all the officers commissions, but I have no idea what that means really beyond the fact that it's a military thing.

Wow, after reading through that it becomes really clear that the guys who decided on the wording of the Constitution really were regular people.  They really were just trying to cobble together a new system of government that would work with everything that was already going on in our country, rather than trying to create a brand new plan to create the ideal society and form of government.  Which sucks for all of us cause we've spent all the time since trying to fix the stuff that was already wrong and attempting to figure out what those guys meant by the stuff that they wrote in the instruction manual.  Nice try guys, but way to be a bunch of slackers!

Turns out that maybe the pants thing isn't the only reason that I probably don't want to be President.  Just going off of the job description alone instead of what different people have interpreted and expanded it to mean over the years it doesn't look like it's a job that's up my alley.  Far from being the most powerful person in the country, it looks like the President isn't supposed to be doing much of anything.  I honestly could get in a lot of pants free time if I were to get elected and just stuck to what the Constitution says I have to do, but I wouldn't get a hell of a lot of control over anything that goes on here in the country I was supposedly the leader of.  That makes sense when you consider what the founders were trying to accomplish by setting up the whole system of checks and balances- it wasn't supposed to matter what the President or any one person thought unless most of the people they were making decisions for agreed with them.  It wasn't supposed to be easy for things to be changed if the people they were being changed for didn't want them to be.  The whole clusterfuck of government was supposed to work slowly and inefficiently if there wasn't a demand and support for it to work quickly.  Sounds like the President was mostly there as the face  we showed the rest of the world whenever we had to participate in things that took us beyond our own borders, and  acting as a human repository for information about how things were going.  The job seems to have been intended to be mostly about studying and advising based upon what was learned from that study rather than doing anything.  He or she really ought to be pretty bored most of the time as long as we aren't at war or in a huge crisis or something.  If they quit all the appearances and campaign related stuff they'd probably even have time to personally read all the different reports and write the treaties and things themselves.  Now the job is starting to sound pretty cool again, cause I'd love to be able to read and write stuff everyday for $400K a year.

Even so, I'm not terribly interested in foreign policy or military strategy so President still isn't my bag.  I'm more interested in dealing with the issues that are affecting me and my neighbors here at home so I should probably stick to just writing about how I'd like to see things running in my own personal version of Utopia and hoping somebody else hits upon the same ideas or reads mine and decides to run with them.