The Presidential Lottery

Garrison Keillor wrote an article for the online journal Salon called "Who wants to see Sarah Palin as the next president?"

I read the article and started thinking about how crazy elections and primaries and conventions are. We go through all of that anguish and trauma and anger for months upon months and we end up with presidents like: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George (the other) Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy C, Richard Nixon and on and on and on.

Really, it's a crazy system we have, and I wrote a letter to Salon offering something a little different.

Here's what I sent to Salon:

The Lottery

Watching the Bush administration treat Iraq like its private AMT for the last seven years, and now faced with the possibility of watching McCain and Palin "bring the pain," I'm starting to think that there needs to be a better way of selecting a president.

Maybe it's time for a national Presidential lottery, a random picking of a president based on only two criteria: you can't be a felon and you got to be at least 35. With our technology, we could easily put everyone who meets the criteria in a big electronic fish bowl and draw a winner.

I know some people will say we already have a lottery. They look at Sarah Palin and say, "She's kind of random. There doesn't seem to be much reasoning behind her selection."

But I think those people miss the point. Palin wasn't picked randomly. McCain must have thought it out, or least thought about it.

Really, we need to get beyond all of this and work on putting in a national lottery.

The biggest advantage is that the odds are we wouldn't get some politico pit-bull, raring to chew off the leg of any Democrat that gets in her way, and we wouldn't get some fuzzy-headed geezer like McCain who unleashed her.

Instead, we'd get some average, random American (like me) who, I'm sure, would do as good a job as McCain or Palin as president without all of the hateful posturing and silly name calling.