Staff Commentary: Build-a-U.S. presidential candidate

When I was home for our second spring break, I passed a Build-A-Bear store in the mall. You know those funhouses where nine-year-old girls, or confused little boys, pick out some sort of animal and vigorously inflate it with synthetic cotton.
As I looked through the window of the place “where friends are made,” I could not help but wonder why we cannot genetically engineer presidential candidates in a similar fashion.

In an election season where image matters more than how people will put food on their tables tomorrow, this manufactured candidate would be some sort of super human. Let’s begin with skin color, shall we? Perhaps the perfect shade of black would be aesthetically pleasing to most. While many criticize Obama for being either too black or not black enough, some Sherwin–Williams’ hue would meet both demands.
The dilemma of whether a female is equipped to be a commander in chief is quite prominent, and many condemn Hillary for showing cleavage or mustering a few tears. The only remedy is to produce a candidate that assumes both sexes. A hermaphrodite will serve the country well in this regard. Plus, no one wants to have an affair with an “it.”

McCain, both a vet and a statue, literally, of political instinct, is often awarded brownie points for his experience. While his knowledge may compensate for what he lacks in humor or personality, his deteriorating frame makes his contention questionable.
The manufactured version could bear a scar on its left arm to demonstrate its participation in battlefield exercises all the while adopting the unbelievable looks of Tom and Gisele’s future love child. This Herculean candidate would be immortal, of course, in order to prevent a vice president from haphazardly becoming head honcho and to eliminate the need for men with small-man syndrome to risk their lives to protect a president who does not know their names.

This model would be internally wound with a pull string in order to alleviate the pressure of creating genuine speech for the public. For some, Obama’s unprecedented discourse on race was purely a political scheme, McCain repeats phrases from speeches made twenty years ago and Hillary echoes her husband’s sentiments. The pull string would be equipped with novel phrases and the vocabulary of Mark Twain himself. The president usually serves as a congressional puppet anyway, so why not have the “heshe” be able to self-automate the pull string?
This genetically engineered candidate would be the purest breed American. (That is an organic blend of Latino, Asian and Native American Indian blood.)

“Heshe” would be a hermaphrodite, painted an agreeable shade of black, have the inability to shed tears, and an implanted speechmaker to win the hearts of the American people.
Or, at least the fifty or so percent of voters who actually exercise this right.