John McCain and Me

I spent a lot of sleepless nights as a kid wondering whether I would be able to serve as President of the United States. I’m not kidding. Not even out of junior high school, I feared I had already been eliminated from contention, not because I was Jewish and no U.S. president had been a Jew, and not because I hadn’t yet reached 35 years of age, the Constitutional minimum: time would cure that. No, I worried I might be ineligible for the simple reason that I happened to be born in Puerto Rico.

You see, the Constitution says the president must be “a natural-born citizen,” though precisely what that means has never been settled in U.S. law. Which brings me to John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

John McCain and I don’t have a lot in common. He served in Viet Nam when I was a college student protesting the war. He’s from Arizona and I live in Massachusetts. He’s a Republican and I am a Democrat. He’s running for president. I am not. Rush Limbaugh hates his guts. Rush Limbaugh has never even heard of me. But McCain and I have a common problem about our eligibility to be president. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Oops!

Now, it surely seems counter-intuitive that a person who has served our country as John McCain has, even enduring years in a North Vietnamese prison, might be ineligible for the presidency because his parents happened to be living in the Canal Zone. And I’m especially sympathetic to McCain on that score because I was born on a U.S. Air Force base in Puerto Rico when my father was stationed there as an Air Force officer. But my sympathies don’t resolve the question: just what did the Founding Fathers mean by “natural-born citizen,” especially since none of them had ever given birth, naturally or otherwise?

The question has arisen before. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, was born in Arizona before it became state. George Romney, father of former candidate Mitt, ran for president in 1968 and he was born in Mexico. (Mitt was so busy trying to stake out ground as the toughest hombre on the immigration block he failed to mention that his father came to this country, literally, from Mexico.)

Did the Founding Fathers really intend to eliminate from contention patriots like John McCain and me just because of the fortuitous circumstances of our birth? After all, we were born, unlike California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, to U.S. citizens on U.S. territories. (Ah-nold, by the way, probably cannot be president and not because he once appeared in a movie as Danny DeVito’s twin.) In my own self-interest, and John McCain’s, I would say that what the Founders were really trying to prevent was the prospect of, say, Prince Charles, running in the New Hampshire primary.

Thus, the real issue here must revolve around the meaning of “natural-born.” The founders, I submit, weren’t referring to a person’s place of birth, but to the method of their birth.

Accordingly, each candidate for president should henceforth be required to submit evidence that he or she (a) is not a test tube baby, (b) was not conceived using anything but the most tried and true methods, and (c) was not delivered by Caesarian section. I can’t speak for John McCain, but I am still in the running. Now I just have to vet my running mate.