five presidents (comment on "spare president")

When I was a kid I learned that spares should be rotated. But that was before radials and directional tread tires.

Now there's a concept, rotating Presidents. Five of them, like the five tires on or in your car, each on seventy-two day shifts, so all five Presidents-elect alternate every station every calendar year.

We don't want to give up the tradition of the White House, so we'll have them all live and work there. With the exception, of course, of the Vice President.

At any given moment, one of the Presidents-elect is the Vice President. Safe - pristine - in his cold, silent undisclosed-location underground bunker his one and only job all day and night is to sit and wait, coiled to leap, for the unlikely but ever-possible abrupt demise of the acting President himself. Deep in the dark bunker, the Vice President waits, and waits, and broods.

Next in the cycle is the job of Press Secretary. Here, seventy-two days in a row he looks the Main Stream Media and Helen Thomas straight in the eye, and says whatever needs to be said.

The next step is to appointed as a Cabinet Secretary of a random department. The department is chosen by lottery, but the lottery is supervised by the previous Secretary of whatever. Here intra-Presidential acrimony is sharpest and most naked, war indoors.

A brief purgative is necessary after all the horrible back-stabbing of the Secretarial phase; for the following seventy-two day task our President-elect is appointed White House cook.

Finally he arises to the glory of the active Presidency itself! Seventy-two days of majestic autonomy, of ultimate responsibility!

If you count carefully, this scheme leaves America for twenty-one days or so in every four-year term un-Presidented. These days are to be officially declared jubilee days. What I have in mind is something like Mardi Gras, but nationwide.