Suppose that you could choose anyone living or dead and poof make him president starting January 2012. Who would you choose?
I assume the following ground rules through the magic of “don’t fight the hypothetical”"
The Constitution has been altered so that foreigners can be considered
Everyone agrees that your choice is the legitimate president, even if they don’t agree with his/her policies
Dead people are allowed to be resurrected at any age you choose, and having been dead isn’t a political liability.
You have 11 months to get your choice up to speed on current affairs.
Translators can be provided for those who don’t speak English.
As I’m not much of an expert at history I’m more interested in what others say, but to get things rolling, I might choose Bobby Kennedy. He is recent enough to be able to get up to speed with what’s going on. Seemed to be a really smart guy, has good Liberal credentials and has become something of a martyr so it would be harder for the right to attack him politically.
A non-exhaustive list:
George Washington
Thomas Paine
Alexander Hamilton
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Franklin
James K Polk
Abraham Lincoln
William Seward
Theodore Roosevelt
Charles Evan Hughes
Milton Friedman
William F Buckley
George Will
Richard Nixon
Ronald Reagan
Jon Huntsman
Foreigners too? then add:
John Wilkes
Richard Cobden
John Bright
William Gladstone
Edmund Burke
Joseph Chamberlain
Otto Von Bismarck
Winston Churchill
Margaret Thatcher
Adam Smith
John Locke
Montesquieu
Watching Theodore Roosevelt kick ass would be even funnier.
That said, the person I would choose would be: Obama.
It’s a whole different world. You can’t just resurrect someone and explain to the them that yes, women and black people can hold office, Jews have their own country, we can magically talk to people on the other side of the world any time we want, there’s a series of tubes connecting us all, now there’s Wikipedia, and Cheezburgers, and cable tv.
We are who we are because of how long it took us to get here. You can’t take someone from even forty years ago and bring him up to speed in a few months.
Yep; by this time, with evidence at hand, Roosevelt would had taken on the robber barons of today that are polluting the environment, it was reported that a long time ago one of the robber barons had come to see the president to chat about why the president was so mean with the nice monopolies and trusts.
Teddy admitted later, that he had to restrain himself from defenestrating the bastard, nowadays I would think he would actually had if confronted by an Exxon executive or the Koch brothers.
Bobby Kennedy is a great choice. I’ll second that nomination.
Paul Wellstone
Eleanor Roosevelt
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ted Kennedy
Shirley Chisolm
Ann Richards
Ben Franklin
Gandhi, although that’s more Utopian than a realistic choice. (Yeah, like “realism” matters in a thread where we could hypothetically pick Genghis Khan! :D)
For the “still alive and barely possible” category I’ll pick:
Al Gore
Mario Cuomo
Andrew Cuomo, though “barely possible” doesn’t really work here – I think he’s a very likely future candidate
Bernie Sanders
Eleanor Holmes Norton
Jimmy Carter
For the “still alive and I’m not even that big a fan of his/hers anymore but I’d just enjoy the entertainment of watching all the Republican heads exploding” category:
Bill Clinton
Barney Frank
Maxine Waters
Jesus – well, truthfully it’s not that I’m not a fan, but I’m not a believer in his divinity. But he belongs in this section 'cause I think he’d be a helluva lot more liberal than Republicans think he’d be, and the resulting whiplash would amuse me to no end.
(And actually, Al Gore and Bernie Sanders would cause much head exploding too, but I am a big fan of theirs, so they don’t make this particular list. :D)
