Chin up, college students; the presidential race is finally relevant. After over a year of pomp and circumstance from presidential hopefuls, election season has annexed the several months previous like Christmas hijacked Thanksgiving. It’s no surprise that Christmas is coming early for candidates across the board, either. In the bad movie sequel that is George W. Bush’s second term, everybody – Democrat and Republican alike – is eager to skip to the credits. For many of us, the upcoming presidential election is to be the first we can vote in. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed all the pageantry; as a young adult, nothing makes me feel more mature than watching grown-ups call one another names like “flip-flopper” and make fun of each others’ haircuts. The presidential race has also proven to equal-opportunity naysayers that issues of sex and race are still highly prevalent in our society. It’s been a gallows-humor sort of amusement watching Hillary Clinton try to prove that she’s feminine-but-not-too-feminine and Barack Obama that he’s black-but-“electable” – whatever that’s supposed to mean. Can a black man or a woman be president? I think raising the question every time one of them makes a public appearance shows that the answer isn’t as obvious as it ought to be. But regardless of race or gender or religion, one thing can be said about all the candidates: I liked them all a lot better before they started running for president. Presidential candidates like to follow the old maxim: “You can’t please all of the people all of the time, unless you pay close attention to the latest Gallup polls.” A viable candidate has to be a real compromiser (read: hypocrite), a people-person (read: two-face) with ambition (read: megalomania). Washington Post columnist David Broder put it best when he said, “Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he’ll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.” What does that say about folks like Rudy Giuliani, who have been running since September 12, 2001? Or Hillary Clinton, who got too comfortable in the White House during her eight-year stay in the ’90s? The presidency is like jury duty: any rational human being wouldn’t want the job, and anybody chomping at the bit to do it ought to have their head examined. Say what you will about the now-defunct Fred Thompson campaign – I liked him by sheer virtue that he didn’t seem all that interested in running. So why not run the electoral process like jury duty? If you want intelligent, level-headed people to do a job that sucks, there’s only one way to do it: make them. Because the presidency is a terrible job, one that nobody in their right mind should want. We live in the “two Americas” America; half the country is bound to be pissed off no matter what you do. George Washington didn’t want it, so do you know what they did? They made him. Not really – not by any systemized jury duty mechanism like the one I’m proposing, at least. His overwhelming sense of duty, coupled with overwhelming public opinion in his favor, behooved him to take the job he never wanted to begin with. So where are the brilliant men and women with a sense of duty that would obligate them to fill the presidential seat? They’re called idealists, and lobbyists and bureaucrats don’t like them; they don’t test well in focus groups, either. I don’t have a lot of recommendations in mind, but then again I don’t agree with the status quo of what makes a “viable candidate.” I think cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker might make a good president – if we make him. Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom Time Magazine called “the Carl Sagan of the 21st century,” would be a good jury-duty candidate as well. I like the idea of bookish scientists running the country – since rich white guys with an aversion to facts and a propensity for “staying the course” no matter where it takes us haven’t exactly been an asset to representative democracy. But maybe there are other prodigious leaders we could force to do the job. Then, rather than watching a bunch of mudslinging and empty promises for 14 months before an election, we can watch a lot of brilliant leaders, noble men and women, try to wriggle their way out of the obligation. That way, candidates will be honest about one of the most important considerations that today’s candidates won’t ever mention: Why they’d be no good at or too busy for the job anyways.

S.P. Sullivan is a Collegian editor. He can be reached at [email protected].