What If We Chose Our President and VP Based on How They Performed on Reality TV Shows?

The process of electing a President has already come to feel much like watching a really bad reality TV show. And since even the best reality TV show is torture, you can imagine what that means. Americans currently choose their President based on ten second sound bites, debates so lacking in substance that Barack Obama did not even call John McCain on his provable lie that we are winning in Iraq, campaign "analysis" by paid staffers of the candidates, and interviews by Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. How sad is that? I say we just do away with the blurred line and go ahead and elect a President based on how they perform on reality TV shows.

Let's start things off by having all four candidates go on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader. Surely, anyone but hardcore Palin lovers would want their next President and Vice-President to be smarter than a fifth grader, right? You have to excuse the Palin lovers because apparently all they expect from a candidate is to be like them; even if that means being a high-school dropout working at McDonald's who never even flips through a Newsweek while waiting to get in to see the doctor. A lot of us, however, have higher expectations and one of those expectations is that the candidate be, well, smart. I have a feeling that John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden would avail themselves pretty well on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader. McCain may even hold a slight advantage here because only facts are required, not analysis. Complexity not being McCain's strong point, he might well win a round on Are Your Smarter Than a Fifth Grader. That's good from the perspective of his supporters because it is quite evident that Sarah Palin would not fare so well. The woman incapable of naming a single news-oriented magazine or being able to recall a single Supreme Court decision would probably fail the test of being smarter than a fifth grader.