The Presidential ticket

“The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled.” — American businessman and two-time U.S. presidential candidate H. Ross Perot (1930-2019).

Back in the day when I was a young Gen X’er, patriotic red-blooded American kids still aspired to be President of the United States. Or, in my case, Vice President.

Superman-esque sort of aspirational stuff with the Stars and Stripes waving in the background — the lofty ideals of truth, justice and the American way.

In Mrs. Kucera’s classroom at Milwaukee’s Washington Irving Elementary School on the city’s northwest side, in our very basic and brief wade into the world of government, politics, civics and citizenship around President’s Day 1975, between the Ford and Carter presidencies, it was taught that becoming president was a dream very much open for all to potentially achieve, albeit only if you got at least 270 votes from the Electoral College.

Consider the humble beginnings of some U.S. presidents who went on to take up residency in the White House in Washington, D.C. Abraham Lincoln. who famously did his homework with a chunk of coal on the back of a shovel in his family’s cabin. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the son of a creamery worker. And haberdasher Harry Truman, whatever a haberdasher was.

The Qualifications Clause set forth in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the American Constitution sets three pretty basic requirements for the job — be a natural-born citizen, at least 35 years of age, and a resident of the United States for at least fourteen years.

The same qualifications apply for veep.

Even in fourth grade, I could easily grasp the concept of biding my time to file papers until I was 35 in the futuristic world of 2000 — Weekly Reader’s predicted George Jetson-esque brave new world of robot maids, Mars colonies and flying cars. 

As I progressed through school over the years I became more politically aware, my high school years wrapping around the 1980 Presidential election and the post-graduation run-up to Decision ’84. 

It was a big deal when Republican candidate Ronald Reagan visited my high school during the 1980 campaign, my memories filled with images running the gamut from Reagan on the field house stage holding up a gift Rebels T-shirt, to the stoners in the parking lot across the street from the high school, standing on their cars and holding up a barely legible “REAGAN DECRIM DOPE” banner.

Students overall in those days were of a decidedly more conservative mindset, Reagan winning the student election poll handily, followed by plain-spoken Republican-turned-independent John B. Anderson, a U.S. Congressman from Rockford, Ill. At 6.6% of the popular vote nationally, with former Democratic Wisconsin governor Patrick Lucey as his vice presidential running mate, Anderson won support among Democrats disillusioned with incumbent Democrat President Jimmy Carter, Rockefeller Republicans, independents, liberal intellectuals, college students, and future newspaper columnists. Carter placed last in our high school poll.

Perhaps mine wasn’t the most informed vote ever at age 15 in our high school’s election poll, but Anderson was the only candidate of the three to land a campaign flier, actually two over the course of the fall presidential campaign, in my family’s mailbox. He got my vote. My folks voted for Carter, my Nana for Reagan. We were all over the political spectrum in ’80.

Along the way in high school I formed a friendship with Steve, a Republican political wonk in the making who was quite possibly the creative inspiration for Family Ties’ conservative Young Republican Alex P. Keaton character, played by Michael J. Fox on the popular NBC TV series.

Steve’s life ambition at the time was to be President of the United States, and those in our close-knit friends group were hand-picked by Steve over the course of our high school career to make up his future White House inner circle. I eventually rose from a Secretary of State appointment to Vice President, potentially a heartbeat away from the presidency, as vividly illustrated by the March 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan.

Back in the era of open high school campuses where students were free to come and go with the ebbs and flows of their class schedules, lunch hours often found Steve and I talking politics around the dinette table in his home just off campus — Reagan Republican Steve and Anderson independent I sparring passionately, if amicably, over politics and wonky policy minutiae. 

It was the daily rubber-meets-the-road dinette table political jousting that would move me up to veep. After all, somebody’s got to bring coffee and donuts to the Cabinet meetings. 

And no, you didn’t miss our campaign for the White House. There never was one — and likely won’t be. Ultimately, Steve became a public school teacher and I became a journalist.

Plus, modern politics requires vast personal wealth and extensive political connections, something you don’t typically come out of Racine with.

That being said, we just might write ourselves in on the ballot in November. 

Vote Steve and Eric. Who could do a better job? Probably Abraham Lincoln, but it’s not 1860.

Eric Johnson can be reached at eric@fyinorthwoods.com.