Nathaniel

Shockey

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June 9, 2008

Drinking With the President: Choose Your New Beer Buddy

President Bush catches a lot of flack for being the president you’d want to have a beer with, which doesn’t quite seem fair. Since when does being a pleasant drunk automatically coincide with lousy foreign policy? And even if Bush is fun to buzz with, is that really the reason we elected him twice?

Either way, despite the jury of public opinion’s official ruling that Bush is the kind of president you’d want to have a beer with, his approval rating is not good.

Personally, I have only ever voted for candidates I’d want to have a beer with, and although I certainly have not agreed with everything Bush has ever done, I’m not your tired, proverbial Bush-hater. As far as I’m concerned, I see no reason to alter my criterion for electing government officials.

But concerning everyone else, there is obviously a need to figure out how to sum up our remaining two presidential candidates – that is, unless we actually plan on voting the issues, which most would agree is as outdated as the electoral college. And even though Hillary Clinton has finally graciously conceded, kicking and screaming, it’s probably worth including her in the discussion simply because she’s fun to talk about.

Of the three remaining candidates, the one with whom I’d be most interested in sharing a beer is definitely John McCain – and yes, I’d like to think he’d stay awake past the first round. He’d tell me about what they did to him and other POWs in Vietnam, and I’d probably end up thinking he was one of the coolest guys ever. We’d also talk about baseball, because if you remember, he was one of the boneheads who threatened governmental interference concerning Performance-Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) – he led a group called “POWs against PEDs” – but I’ve since forgiven him, and that’s really not the point.

The point is, he cares about America’s pastime, which I think should be a requirement for any U.S. president. He’d also tell me all the dirt about all the talk show hosts who have interviewed him, which I think extends from the Daily Show to Spring Break 1999 with Carson Daly. McCain eats that stuff up.

But unfortunately, Bush has already claimed the official title, “The president you’d want to have a beer with”. So who is McCain?

I’ll go with, “The easiest president to lose in snow,” on account of his shiny white hair. I don’t know whether this is helpful, and I can’t help thinking that it is not. But the problem is that, aside from being the only remaining candidate with whom I’d willingly share a beer, I really don’t know how else to distinguish him yet.

So you’re probably wondering why I wouldn’t want to drink with Barack Obama. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s probably because he seems above it. He’d probably start psychoanalyzing me and saying the reason I drink is because I’m upset about my income level, and he’d probably go on to explain that I drink for the same reason I maintain conservative views. At this point, I’d ask him if he had conservative views when he was a smoker, and after he was done explaining this away, there’s a good chance we’d get into a physical scrap, which, quite honestly, I can’t imagine I’d lose. I saw a clip of him playing basketball with UNC and he looked incredibly scrawny, which leads me to believe that he probably can’t hold his liquor. No, I don’t think I’d want to drink with Obama.

Obama is either “The president you’d want to get in a fight with,” or perhaps “The president you’d want to lose in snow.” But if that is too harsh, you could just go with “The most impressive-looking president since John F. Kennedy.”

It wouldn’t be fair to the candidates still in the race to give too much thought to classifying Hillary Clinton, so I’ll try to be brief.

For starters, I’d love to have a beer with her, not because she’d have any good college stories, nor because we could talk about the NBA Finals, and I’m pretty sure she was never a member of POWs against PEDs. But who wouldn’t want to get Hillary drunk and ask her about Bill? Does he make his own sandwiches? What is his drink of choice? Does he do a good Yoda impression?

If you ever got enough drinks in her, there’s about a 100 percent chance she’d end up going off on a tirade about Bill and his various indiscretions, which she’d probably paraphrase quite loosely at that point. And so Hillary would have to be called, “The president you’d want to have 10 beers with.”

I think it was Hillary who first enlightened us by saying we elected a president we’d want to have a beer with, which leads me to believe that she’s much smarter than I ever gave her credit for.

And thanks to her, I’ll probably end up voting for McCain.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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