Job Opening, Some English Required

This week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he supported a constitutional amendment to allow foreign-born Americans to run for president. At first I was puzzled by his interest in this issue, but then I discovered a little-known fact about the man: He was born in Austria. You’d never know it from hearing him talk, but then he is a highly skilled actor.

And he makes a good point: The Constitution is full of silly, outdated stuff about separating church and state and not putting you in jail without a trial. It’s full of lots of 18th century slang like “freedom” and “privacy.”

And one of the silliest things of all is the part where it says foreigners can’t be president. Arnold’s right. The problem with presidents today is that they come off as a little too ... American. We’ve got that whole cowboy “bring it on” thing goin’. What we need is a presidency injected with a little sensitivity and worldly sophistication. And who better to deliver that than the grab-and-grope action hero from “Jingle All the Way”? Schwarzenegger mentioned the German-born Henry Kissinger as someone who would have made a great president had the Constitution not been in the way -- as if that ever stopped Kissinger.

Quite frankly, I think of foreigners as more educated and more socially progressive when it comes to issues such as abortion, euthanasia, birth control, the environment, religion, marriage, materialism, nuclear disarmament, poverty, human rights and life on Earth as we know it. They generally speak at least two languages and have, by definition, traveled outside the United States.

They’re also less likely to wear spurs and a 4-foot-tall lime-green Styrofoam cowboy hat to an international conference and call everybody they meet there “Shooter!” Foreigners can’t run for president? I believe only foreigners should run for president.

American presidents are like American beer -- bland, watered down and advertised to us as if we’re morons. They come from boring places like Hope, Ark., Yorba Linda, Calif., and that town in Texas where President Bush was born: New Haven, Conn.

Face it, the presidency is a lousy job. And who does lousy jobs we don’t want anymore better than foreigners?

The guy we’ve got doing it now works only part time. He spends half the day raising money from mining companies and the other half telling schoolchildren that Al Qaeda wants them dead, and he’s in bed by 7!

The average Frenchman knows more geography than we do. The average Japanese knows more math. And the average Guatemalan is already here, cleaning your house and taking care of your kids. If we can trust them with our children, why not the White House? They can run it and clean it.

As a history buff, I’ve noticed that of all the worst presidents in U.S. history, every single one of them was an American. Doesn’t anyone see a pattern here? Nixon, Carter, Hoover -- down the line -- Thomas E. Dewey, all native-born Americans. Which only goes to show that sometimes ethnic profiling ... well, sometimes it’s just a matter of common sense.

Just once I’d like my president, the nation’s president, to be like one of those presidents Italy always has, with the expensive suits and the permanent tan and the Versace mistress, and there’s photos of them canoodling on a boat but nobody cares because hey, that’s amore. Our guy gets impeached. In Italy, the stock market goes up.

It comes down to this: British people just sound better than we do. When they ask Tony Blair about weapons of mass destruction, the stuff he pulls out of his hat always sounds so much better than the stuff Bush pulls out of his hat. We’re Americans, don’t we deserve the best?

It’s too late to undo the injustice that kept foreign-born presidential timber like Madeleine Albright and William Shatner out of the White House. But think of the future!

The job of president is just too important to be left to an American.