on the pResiDENcy

I'm not going to give my opinion on Barack Obama, but I am going to share Sarah Vowell's opinion on the qualities a president should possess.   I totally agree with her.

"I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's  'Two Sleepy People,' Johnny Cash's 'Five Feet High and Rising,' and 'You Got the Silver' by the Rolling Stones.  After all, the United States is the greatest country on the earth dealing with the most complicated problems of the world--poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem.  What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office Computer, and one by one decrypt our woes."

Wouldn't that be nice?