The President is a man whom you and your nation have appointed to that office. After the elections, it always turns out that a whole bunch of people you know personally are better equipped for the job.

The problem is that the list of candidates you get to consider every four years is severely limited. As a rule, there are three or four persons on it with a chance of getting elected, one of whom is a socio-political climber, another a business shark, yet another a bureaucrat with obviously criminal tendencies, and the fourth a boring mediocrity. Take your pick. Before you do, you could, in fact, take a look at each candidate’s list of achievements, if you really want to.

Did you ever stop to think, though, who, exactly, comes up with all those candidates from whose number your next Chief Executive will be selected by you? In theory, the candidates are promoted by their respective political parties. You are well aware, though, that only a handful of party leaders have any say in who is going to be the next candidate. These few stand firmly behind the candidate’s back, expecting to benefit personally from running your country should you choose their nominee.

In the past, each political party, regardless of the degree of its influence, had a well-defined social orientation. In all democratic and quasi-democratic countries there were landowner parties, labor parties, farmers’ parties, monarchists, aristocrats, communists (who for some reason thought of themselves as representatives of the working class), and so forth. Each party’s doctrine rested on the then-current social conditions of their country. In addition to all those parties, there has always existed a group of people known as the intelligencia. Even though they have never been registered as a party (socialists and communists thought of the intelligencia as a class, in fact), they remain pretty powerful and influential to this day. They are united (or sometimes divided) by their views. The one thing that really holds them together as a group is their intellect. You will find among them scientists, engineers, book authors, journalists, artists, Bohemians of all sorts, and so forth. Today, they are so powerful, they actually threaten to compete with the registered parties, even though they still refuse to view themselves as a political entity. They think it’s beneath them. As for the rest of the parties, they seem to have lost their clear orientation.

In the United States, there are two leading parties – the Democrats and the Republicans. During the last election campaign, both presidential candidates appeared on TV to express their views on current events. George W. Bush, the Republican incumbent, would lower himself elegantly on a tall stool now and then. John Kerry, the Democrat, kept pacing back and forth in front of the cameras in a stylish and, it would seem, somewhat nervous manner. The broadcast resembled an ordinary TV show. A few scantily attired pretty girls in the background wiggling their thighs in time to a popular tune would have made the impression complete.

An outrage? Perhaps. And yet, the Americans seem to get away with light-hearted election campaigns. The reason is that in more than two centuries of democratic rule, the United States has developed a kind of social immunity that prevents obviously unworthy candidates ending up in the White House.

Russia, to pick a country at random, has virtually no experience for the democratic process. A whole slew of faceless parties have emerged over there in recent years, such as the United Russia, Our People, the Apple (a front for promoting Macintosh computers, one would imagine), and even the Communist Party. A Youth Party and a Retirees Party might be on the way. Each party appoints its own candidate. Each candidate, with his party’s full support, sings his own praises, utilizing all promotion techniques available to him, in order to convince the nation that he is the only one worthy of running their country four them. There is a similar system in France. The British model is somewhat more complex.

In the meantime, you, the voter, are so accustomed to the ritualistic aspect of all political campaigns, you have ceased to notice how humiliating they are – for the candidates as well as for yourself. Like many others, you have long since realized that the candidate promotion system needs to be fundamentally reformed in order to be consistent with our computer-powered, technology-driven epoch. A little later, we will discuss some possibilities. In the meantime, let us find out what kind of person your President should be.

First of all, your President should be intelligent. You yourself are insightful and experienced enough to figure out which of the candidates is the smartest. It’s not rocket science. Listen. Your President should be, not just intelligent, but really, really smart. Maybe even a genius. Well, that’s probably too much to ask. Fine. Just pretty smart, then.

What milieu should your President come from? Any old milieu, really. What does it matter? He can be a good corporate manager or a successful farmer, a talented general, engineer, scientist, artist or author. (Incidentally, the Czechs once elected an author to run their country for them. A talented one, too).

Should you vote for a candidate who has dedicated all of his life to politics, though? Not really. A career politician is certain to get carried away with the game and lose sight of what the voters really want from him, his honesty and degree of patriotism notwithstanding. Why should your candidate be a politician, anyway? An intelligent person knows his politics no matter what his occupation is. Once elected, he could always hire a few competent consultants who would fill him in on whatever nuances of presidential policy he may not be familiar with. A couple of weeks would probably suffice.

The most important thing you should pay attention to when choosing your President is this. He must not belong to any party. A party is a group held together by common interests that may not coincide with other people’s. A good President should be above party politics.

What about your President’s looks? He shouldn’t look old. He should have a pleasant-looking face, athletic body, and good manners. The President’s duties oftentimes oblige him to appear in front of TV cameras. It is certainly more gratifying to see a handsome person on your TV screen than an old geezer. Not too much to ask of a President? No, not really. Don’t forget that you live in a city of a few million souls, and many of your neighbors would fit the bill better than the candidates offered to you by party leaders.

Should you go ahead and elect a woman to be your President provided she meets all the proper requirements? You should, as an exception, maybe. The generative disposition is dominant in men; the sustentative disposition in women. Can you picture a woman in Winston Churchill’s shoes? Hardy. Napoleon, Beethoven, Pushkin, Byron, Shakespeare, Einstein – could any of them have been women? A successful corporate career, on the other hand, requires the kind of sustentative disposition that oftentimes keeps creativity in check. Ever since women were granted equal rights, they have been making headways as executives, competing successfully and oftentimes getting ahead of men in the office. The consequences are numerous, and not all of them look good. In education, to pick a field, women play a dominant role today, to which at least some of the system’s failures can be attributed. As a “minority,” women find it easy to hold onto jobs whose actual purpose requires creativity. This has resulted in decline in many fields. Morality is in tatters, with the term “politically correct” effectively suppressing all constructive criticism (as in calling a fool a fool, and a scoundrel a scoundrel). Talent has yielded to mediocrity. Art is degrading rapidly. Can you name one truly brilliant contemporary artist, composer, or poet? Hardly. Modern science, however, seems to be doing well, for now. There aren’t too many women Noble Prize winners in physics or biology, not yet.

Presidential duties require some major creative thinking.

What about the President’s morals?

Not too long ago (historically speaking), President Clinton spent some time behind the scenes putting the moves on a woman who turned out to be accessible. Using her inherent sustentative qualities, she proved to be practical enough to choose the right moment to create a media sensation that seems to have brought her substantial material gains since. On the other hand, it was never a secret that President Kennedy used every chance to drag a pretty girl into bed, sometimes two or three different ones on the same day, and yet the media kept quiet. With his brother’s assistance, JFK’s masterful control of the press was second to none. The two examples could serve as a warning for you, voter. Don’t let the media’s opinions influence your decisions. Should you vote for a known skirt-chaser? Please don’t. Sexual pathology is incompatible with the job. By the same token, a well-pronounced prudery should be avoided as well. As a rule, a candidate has a large circle of acquaintance that includes many women. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for a normal person to avoid a chance amorous encounter. A handsome-looking, sociable person who has not gone astray even once despite numerous opportunities should automatically be suspect – excessive Puritanism is just another form of sexual pathology. Your President should be a normal, anomaly-free guy, since anomalies are indicative of psychiatric defects.

Now suppose the candidate you want to vote for is a woman. What then? A whole different sexual criteria should apply.

Nature has bestows on humans a powerful sexual instinct whose main purpose, when all is said and done, is reproduction. A woman can reproduce once a year (this would include the beginning of the breast-feeding period during which many women feel no desire for sexual activity). In order to conceive a child, a woman only needs one sexual partner. On the other hand, a man generates active semen every two and a half days. Theoretically, a normal sexually active man could conceive a hundred and forty children a year, provided he engaged one hundred and forty different women to accomplish it. The ratio of, roughly, one hundred and forty to one is encoded in the very fabric of human nature. Because our psychology and physiology are closely related, the two genders have different moral codes. A man who has cheated on his wife may be frowned upon by his milieu, and yet deep down in their hearts, his neighbors are sometimes jealous of him. A woman cheating on her husband, on the contrary, may be openly envied by some of her girlfriends, and yet deep down in their hearts they automatically think of her as a slut. As do their men. This has nothing to do with gender bias. The phenomenon is merely a reflection of the natural reproductive potential ratio that cannot be affected by feminist protests.

And so, your President should be an intelligent, honest, and decent person. This may sound too general, or too vague, but that’s an illusion. In reality, intelligence, honesty and decency are very precise, utterly concrete, unambiguously real concepts. So much so that they do not even require definitions. You shouldn’t demand that your candidate be perfect, though. There is no such thing.

Now let us get back to the question of the candidate selection system. The few men and women mentioned earlier (the ones who normally get nominated) seem to have neither a moral nor a legal right to run. Someone out there, someone you could trust, should be given the task of selecting candidates for your consideration. Who? The following scenario could work.

First, your entire country should be divided into electoral regions. If you’re an American, this step isn’t even necessary – we have our States. Each State would appoint a number of young men and women (say, five or six), who would be called, say, Choosers. These men and women would be law majors, recent graduates of local universities, young enough not to be corrupted by political plotting. The Choosers would have the same qualities as your future President, i.e. intelligence, honesty, and decency. Armed with modern technology, using Internet resources freely, they would select two, three, or four candidates from each state for your consideration.

Suppose we’re talking about Colorado. Having a pretty clear idea of their home State’s demographics, the five Choosers would run a few surveys. Being sociable, as many young people tend to be, they would be able to contact folks from every walk of life. Denver, the capital of Colorado, has three universities, an opera theatre, a number of museums of national importance; there is the famous Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs; there are observatories and world-famous ski resorts in the Rockies. The vast meadows serve as pastures for hundreds of thousands of cattle. The minerals include molybdenum, coal, oil, and gas. All in all, it’s a pretty good place for intelligent, energetic folks to utilize their skills, and such people are invariably in the public eye. It would take the five Choosers only a week or two, tops, to select some candidates from their number – five, or eight, maybe. In other, more populous, states, such as New York, California, or Washington, the number could be higher – ten or fifteen candidates. Once the selection process is complete, all Choosers would convene in a conference room on Capitol Hill, from which outsiders would be barred. There would be roughly three hundred Choosers (representing the fifty-one States). With the help of a unified computer system, the Choosers would integrate the faults and merits of all five hundred candidates (roughly). As young people tend to be temperamental, spirited debates among the Choosers would then follow, resulting in the selection of, roughly, five candidates altogether (a larger number might confuse some voters). This would be followed by the actual election process, which would begin with public assessment of the selected candidates: a televised test.

We should remember at this point that even though the proposed system is better than the current model, it is far from ideal. The main thing, however, is for the voter to realize the urgency of altering the existing system. It is the most important political issue in your country today.

After the four or five candidates have been introduced to the public (on your TV screen), after their names have been announced and their biographical data and earlier careers detailed for you, a session would follow during which each candidate would have to answer questions in front of millions of viewers. The questions would cover various areas of human knowledge. Strict measures would be taken to make sure that none of the candidates knows the questions beforehand, the way it is done in some TV trivia shows.

Here are some sample questions a candidate would have to answer:

1. In what year was Julius Caesar killed?

2. How much does an average cabdriver in Cincinnati pay for his lunch? How much does his lunch cost a Manhattan cabdriver?

3. Name the main points President George W. Bush made in his speech immediately following September Eleven.

4. Take this notepad. Here’s a pen. Write down Einstein’s energy formula.

5. What is the yearly salary of an average physician in the State of Montana?

6. Which NBA team won the championship last year?

7. Name the approximate annual state budget of Louisiana.

8. Pick up that pen again. Write down the first line of Lord Byron’s poem Manfred.

9. What is the top speed of today’s most technologically advanced American fighter plane? And the bomber’s speed?

10. Show the candidate a Boticelli painting and a Giotto painting. Ask him to name the authors.

11. What is the population of Thailand?

12. What hockey team do you root for?

14. Let the candidate listen to two fragments from symphonies by Mozart and Prokofieff. Ask him whether he can distinguish between the two different styles. Name the styles. Name the composers.

15. How many soldiers do we have in Iraq right now?

16. In what century did Jewish Christians and Jewish traditionalists started to draw away from one another?

17. How many kilowatts of electrical energy does America consume on a daily basis? Which part of this energy is supplied by nuclear power plants? Hydro? Coal-powered plants?

18. What is the approximate amount of money an average retiree receives from his pension plan in Denver, Colorado? In New York?

19. Describe the basic principle of the National Missile Defense. How does it work?

20. What percentage of the population is engaged in agriculture in the United States? In Canada? In Iran?

21. Name two of your favorite American writers. Name two of your favorite foreign writers.

22. Show the candidate a few photographs of famous actors and actresses. Let him tell which ones, in his opinion, are the sexiest.

23. In the State of Oklahoma, how many people are unemployed as we speak?

24. What tools does a plumber use in order to repair a faucet leak? What would he use to unclog a toilet?

25. Who is today’s best Wagnerian tenor?

26. What is your favorite city?

27. Show us your handkerchief. (This might sound absurd to some folks. However, the state of one’s handkerchief shows how it is used. If the handkerchief is carefully folded (or absent), it would suggest that its owner uses paper tissues instead. One way or the other, such seemingly insignificant details can reflect one’s cultural level and/or upbringing).

There should be over a hundred such questions.

Over a hundred? Wouldn’t that be too many? No.

No candidate should be able to answer all of them. It wouldn’t be necessary, either. Failure to answer certain types of questions would be indicative of, not just the candidate’s erudition, but his character, outlook, and taste as well. The voter ought to know whom he’s voting for, be familiar with all kinds of stuff about his candidate. It might take three or four broadcasts to show the entire session. After that, a few days would be allowed for discussions and debates – in the media, naturally, but mostly among the voters themselves – in the street, at the local diner, in the neighborhood bar, at home, face-to-face, or over the phone. Private funding of election campaigns should be banned outright (and anyway, the method we have just described would eliminate the need for it). Spending millions on presidential campaigns creates an illusion that Presidency can be bought. Such an illusion is humiliating for democratic society.

As for the Congress elections, they could be left the way they are today. As practice has demonstrated, the hostility and mistrust between the Legislative and Executive branches can be useful – indispensable, in fact. A proper government cannot exist without opposition and a whole bunch of internal contradictions. A completely independent President (elected by you and your people) would stand against the Congressmen imposed on you by party leaders – how about it?