Another Way to Choose a President, Part I – Road Trip!
By P.J. O'Rourke
You may be happy with the outcome of the 2016 presidential election... You may be unhappy with the outcome... You may be taking a wait-and-see attitude... Or you may not give a flying Wallenda about who's in the Oval Office...
But nobody was happy with the 2016 presidential campaign. It lasted forever. It was over-crowded. It was noisy. It was nasty. And it was trivial. Very few of the candidates had anything important to say about crucial issues such as debt, deficit, and a hopelessly politicized monetary system.
After the campaign was over everybody was left thinking, "There must be another way to choose a president."
Well, I have an idea...
What we could do, every four years, is gather all the people running for president in one place (preferably a place that serves beer). Then voters would ask themselves just one question: "Which candidate would I go on a road trip with?"
I believe even President Trump would be down with this method of picking a chief executive. Trump, of course, would assume that he'd win the "Road Trip Poll" – private jet! golf! luxury resorts! limos!
And he could be right.
Personally, I don't know what it would be like to spend an extended period of time traveling in close quarters with Donald Trump. Maybe we'd have fun...
Or maybe I'd wind up wanting to chip a Titleist into the back of his head while he stood on the green nudging his ball into an "alternative fact" of being closer to the hole...
On the other hand, there's the terrible thought of traveling with Hillary. Boy, can she yackety-yak!
And she'd probably want to stop to eat in all those dumpy little small town diners where she kept showing up during the campaign, instead of the steakhouses Donald prefers.
But let's leave the most recent election out of the equation. Instead, let's apply the "Road Trip Poll" selection criteria to prior elections and see what the results would have been.
I've been researching the matter. I've found that in the 17 presidential elections held between 1948 and 2012, the "Road Trip Poll" selected the better candidate 70.5% of the time. Of course, that's strictly my personal opinion. I'll present the evidence and let the reader come to his or her own conclusions.
I used the period after 1948 as the basis for my study because these are the optimal Road Trip years in American history.
By 1948, gas rationing had ceased, civilian auto production was in full swing, and plans for an "Interregional Highway system" were taking shape.
Before the 1940s, a road trip was something the dust bowl Joad family did in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Before that, America didn't have much in the way of roads. In 1919, the U.S. Army Motor Transport Corps drove a convoy of trucks from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. It took 56 days. And before that, there were wagon trains.
In the movie Animal House, when the despairing Delta fraternity president Robert Hoover asks, "What are we going to do?" Otter and Boon do not shout, "Westward migration of pioneer settlement!"
Herewith the "Road Trip Poll" data:
Salty, poker-playing Harry Truman beginning each day with a shot of Old Grand-Dad vs. Thomas E. "little man on a wedding cake" Dewey
Yes, Truman was a Democrat, which I am not. But he was honest about it. Dewey was a "progressive Republican." This is a creature something like the pushmi-pullyu in the Dr. Dolittle stories, except with two butt ends. (Nelson Rockefeller would become the next progressive Republican to fall on both of his behinds.)
Jolly golfer Ike vs. po-face Adlai Stevenson
Eisenhower won WWII. Stevenson was a special assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and in 1944 traveled to Italy as a representative of the U.S. Foreign Economic Administration to report on Italy's economy, which, in 1944, did not exist. Later he was the governor of Illinois for one term.
Jolly golfer Ike vs. po-face Adlai Stevenson rematch
Even playing with a large handicap (1955 heart attack), Ike easily broke par. Adlai was in the rough for the rest of his life.
Charming, charismatic JFK vs. Richard – no adjectives needed – Nixon
A cinch for the "R.T.P." Or so you'd think. A road trip with Richard Nixon would seem like gum surgery on wheels. But Hunter S. Thompson actually went on a road trip with Nixon – or, anyway, on a car ride – in New Hampshire during the 1968 presidential campaign. Hunter described it in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72:
There were only two of us in the back: just me and Richard Nixon, and we were talking football in a serious way... It was a very weird trip; probably one of the weirdest things I've ever done, and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it.
What's weirder yet is that Nixon might have had greater success than Kennedy as president. He certainly would have handled the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis in a more Star Wars "Luke, I am your father" way. But even conservative me (if I'd been old enough at the time) couldn't have resisted a joyride with Handsome Jack.
Bullroaring Longhorn LBJ vs. Barry "Nuke 'Em" Goldwater
Here the "R.T.P." was just plain wrong. Beneath the good ol' boy façade of Lyndon Johnson was Lyndon Johnson. And Goldwater, in retrospect, was a man with incorruptible political principles that leave modern Republicans asking, "How much do those cost?"
Richard Nixon vs. Hubert Humphrey
The problem was all of Lyndon Johnson's luggage that Hubert Humphrey was carrying. There wouldn't have been any room for beer in the car.
Tricky Dick vs. George McGovern
McGovern's first pick for VP, Thomas Eagleton, was a veteran of road trips with George and had to have electroshock therapy.
Jimmy Carter vs. Jerry Ford
The "R.T.P." was wrong again. Really wrong. So wrong that I don't know how to explain it. Jerry Ford was a star football player at the University of Michigan, on a team that was undefeated for two straight seasons. The Wolverines know how to party! Jimmy Carter was a born-again peanut farmer. We wouldn't even get any cashews in the cocktail mix. Or any cocktails either. Maybe we weren't paying attention and got him mixed up with his brother Billy.
Happy-go-lucky Ron vs. Persimmon-Puss Jimmy
Hollywood, here we come!
Reagan vs. Whoever that stiff was
Hollywood, here we come again!
George H. W. Bush vs. "I have to go take a Dukakis"
The phrase in quotations is a word-for-word off-the-record quote from Bush 41 obtained on deep background.
Bill Clinton vs. George Bush
"Toga! Toga!" to quote Bill's Washington colleague and Animal House alumni Sen. John Blutarsky.
The guy in the Viagra ads vs. The guy getting his food laced with saltpeter by Hillary
Maybe Bill Clinton wasn't the sane choice over Bob Dole, but he was the insane choice. Party on, Dude!
The frat boy from Yale's DKE Animal House vs. Al Gore, nickname "Albert"
No need to read the SparkNotes on this one.
W. vs. John Kerry
Kerry would have been ordering Chateauneuf-du-Pape ('90) at the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago, wondering where the Ritz Carlton was located in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and worrying about getting stone chips on his BMW 7 Series.
Barack Obama vs. John McCain
The "R.T.P." was really, really wrong yet another time. One was a fighter pilot. The other flew an adjunct professor of constitutional law's speaker lectern.
Obama vs. Mitt Romney, a Mormon
With all due respect to members of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, Romney doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and doesn't fool around. Maybe Obama doesn't either... these days. But "Barry" was a member of the "Shroom Gang" back at his high school in Hawaii. And I'll bet if he was riding shotgun with '70s disco music blasting on the stereo and you handed him a tall cool one, he'd remember how it's done.
Regards,
P.J. O'Rourke