Cape Cod Sports Desk

He Who Would Be King

Here's my history class essay, due Monday...

 The Best Americans Who Were Never President

Some got smoked, some cashed their own check, some never cared for the job, some just never had the time... but here are a few people from History who should have had 4-8 years running Les Etats-Unis.

Not all of these choices would be Good..but they would all be Great, in the sense that people might describe an explosion or a plague as being "great." At least we'd have been entertained, and that's what it really comes down to once you cross the Is and dot the Ts.

There are generals, pols, businessmen, natural leaders, con artists,visionaries, and men of great style on this list. It's just one girl's view, so let the debate begin!

George Patton

Think of all the Cold War money we would have saved if we nuked Stalin in 1945. It would also have been funny to see the Presidency run from a tank heading east across the Ukraine.

Tell me this guy wouldn't have won like 5 straight terms if he wasn't killed (murdered?) in a very,very shady Jeep accident. If he were alive today, he could STILL kick most of our asses.

Well.. yours, maybe. It's my essay. I pretty much snap the necks and cash the checks around here. Remember that when you're grading me. 

Benjamin Franklin

He did most of the heavy lifting required of the job, was well-respected both in American and European political circles, bled red, white, and blue, and is still viewed as one of the more intelligent men of a great era.

He's also on the $100 bill. 22% of Americans surveyed believe he was the President once. Every state has a town named after him, and every town has a street named after him. His recent Freemasons commercials were a big cross-demographic success. He'd campaign much like Perot did-as a quirky but effective outsider- and I'd bet that he'd be big on the Internet.

The fact that George Washington once never said "I'm not a homosexual... but if I had to let one man f***me, it would most likely be Benjamin Franklin" pretty much quells the debate,as far as I'm concerned.

Martin Luther King

MLK had the charisma, if nothing else. Those speeches he made were simply magic, and maybe he could have brought us all together if he didn't get moped out at a Motel 6 by some redneck whacko.

There's no Thomas Jefferson or FDR Day. Most kids couldn't tell you who Frederick Douglass or Eugene Debs were. Even the Great Emancipator sort of got shafted out of his holiday.

MLK has moved past all of them, in his own way. With the glorious 20/20 that is hindsight, I can say that History has given him all the props that a President needs. He just never held the office.

Alexander Hamilton

He's most famous for either the $20 or for getting smoked, but he was there for all the Founding Fathers stuff, and most likely would have had his turn driving if Aaron Burr wasn't so easily offended.

Even if you go to Harvard, kids... learn how to handle a firearm. It's better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. 

Donald Trump

 I don't know if he'd scare the Red Chinese, but he probably could have won in the 1980s if he somehow could have snuck past Bush I into the Dukakis election.

The hidden bonus here would have been when his clotheshorse wife started redesigning the White House. The Lincoln Bedroom probably needed a faux gilded waterfall, anyhow.

Don King

"Only In America" would be a great slogan, and what says "American Dream" better  than a guy coming off a manslaughter bid to rule the Free World? It's sort of anti-recidivism, with really cool hair. Most of us are here because we flunked out of Europe, and King would speak to that Boy Made Good in all of our hearts.

Vice President Tyson would just be the beginning of what could potentially go wrong here. The temporary relocation of the White House to Caesar's Palace would be a nice way to keep future students awake in history class.

Also, the election that produced President Don King would be studied for centuries.. most likely even on other planets, once we made inter-galactic contact with other civilizations.

Metacom

If things broke just a little differently in King Phillip's War.. and we're talking a tribal alliance here and a bit of bad military work there... this little blip of a man in our history books may indeed have been the leader of a powerful Indian confederation that moved down and attacked Virginia after clearing the crackers out of Massachusetts.

From there, it would be off to the west to deal with the Apache/Sioux/etc.. who would most likely hitch their wagons to the juggernaut if they had any idea what was good for them. The Spanish would be easy pickings at that point. If they could figure out how to grow and trade tobacco or cotton, they might even be in the UN right now.

The line between "American Genghis Khan" and "had his head chopped off and displayed on a pole outside Plymouth" is often thinner than you think. I even personally believe it was close in a DNA/ancestor/land bridge sense.

 Robert E.Lee

Pretty much the same deal as Metacom, except that it involves a Pickett's Charge breakthrough, a march on Washington, a Union thrown into chaos, a Confederate military dictatorship, maybe a Napoleon III invasion to bring us together under the strongest army... and it all spirals down to where we have an all-white Olympic basketball team that loses to Angola a lot... and no one is very much surprised.

While it probably wouldn't have broken down this way, it would be funny seeing James Longstreet on the $50 bill, and Bo + Luke Duke fleeing from the police in their "General Meade" car. Rap music would most likely suck, though...

Douglas MacArthur

A lot of people today fail to see that it's all eventually going to come down to the USA and China fighting it out somewhere. Dougie Mack saw it all too clearly in 1950. What would have come of us taking on China then? Sure, they kicked us down to Pusan, but we killed them by the bushel-basket. I wonder how many of their cities we'd have to incinerate before they tapped out of a Sino-American war?

I'll tell you this... if I'm fighting a billion Chinese, I'd rather do it when I have nuclear bombs and they don't. Also note that the Japanese had been kicking the sh*t out of them before WWII, and we beat the Japs into economy-car-manufacturing subservience. We'd also have a Taiwan to mess with them with.

Once we polished off China,we could turn on the Middle East and take all their oil... then it'd be us vs.the Martians in 2187 AD.

Wars aside...the Truman/MacArthur campaign would be the nastiest feud eva. Shaq/Kobe or Hatfield/McCoy would look like an orgy next to a Harry/Doug throwdown.

Helen Keller

Blind, deaf,and du...er, socialist.

Socialism was big in her day,and she would probably be the most sympathetic of the candidates that the Reds could have run at the time. It's a longshot, but nothing has surprised me since the 2004 World Series.

Al Capone

America wants booze more than law, and Al Dope Capone rolls over Hoover or whoever is ballsy enough to campaign against the anti-Prohibition "Al Have Another."

I'd put it as even money that Hitler would have de-anschlussed Austria and un-occuppied the Rhine if US President Al Capone made some sort of public gesture demonstrating his displeasure regarding the matter. The converse of this is pretty much why I wouldn't vote for Hillary.