I never thought much about running for President. For most of my life, the White House was out of reach, given my being Jewish. I did have one brush with such a calling when one of my first wife’s many cousins suggested that I should become President of their cousin’s club. I did not throw my hat, maybe it was a yarmulke, into the ring. But now, some 60 years later, the thought crosses my mind. After all, since 2016, the American dream of anyone, however unqualified, becoming President has been realized.
I have looked carefully at the rapidly growing field of Democrats that have announced or are pretty sure to announce and believe that I am a much better choice than any of them. I say this not out of immodesty, but certainty. First of all, I am, by far, the oldest, and that allows me to say, more than any other one, that I can remember when America was really, really a great place to live. I was getting ready for my Bar Mitzvah when Joe Biden was born.
The second qualification is that I have never run for office nor collected a penny in the pursuit of one. Whoops, I need to qualify that; I did run for President of my Senior Class at MIT, but came a close second To Marion Manderson. I thought my campaign slogan – Keep the Campus Clean: Install a New John – was a sure winner.
While I have been a registered Democrat virtually all my voting life, I plan to run as a conservative Liberal Social Democrat on a platform of restoring America to the days when our future and boundaries were limitless. Of course I am speaking only in metaphors. Given that the Planet is finite, we will have to pull in our belts a little, well, maybe a lot. We are using up the Planet’s resources, by any way you want to measure it, at about 1 1/2 times its sustainable capacity. Another way of pointing to the biophysical limitations of the Planet is the idea of Earth Overshoot Day, the day each year we have used up one Earth’s worth of resources, including its capacity to absorb the detritus of humanity’s activities. In 2018, Earth Overshoot Day was celebrated (I don’t think that’s quite the right word) on August 1.
My economic plan is to outdo the meager promises of Herbert Hoover (“a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.“). I promise all will have artificial, cultured hamburgers (no GMOs, of course) every night, and a Tesla behind all three garage doors. We all know that Hoover, an engineer from Stanford, failed miserably, but I will not, having my degrees from the real engineering school, MIT.
Having observed the folly of building a fence of concrete and steel, I will maintain our porous borders using a much more effective solution, the invisible fence. It has kept my several golden retrievers safe within my yard for years. I plan to replace NAFTA with a new treaty that requires our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, to equip everyone attempting to approach the border with a collar, just like those used to shock dogs to learn not to cross the invisible, buried fenceline.
Having laid out the key planks of my platform, I will step back and consider whether to run or not in the next few weeks. I will be asking for guidance from a number of very experienced Americans and I eagerly await their responses. You will certainly recognize some of their names: Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton. I note with pride that two of these come from my home state, Massachusetts.
My website will be up in a few weeks. You will be able to donate there, but please no amounts greater than $4.99. You will also be able to visit the shop and buy all sorts of campaign paraphernalia, bearing my catchy slogan logo: Tired, Yet Relentless; Against New Taxes (TYRANT). My ears are open and my hearing aids are on. Let me hear from you.