"This Is the Best We Can Do, Folks"

Story Sent in by James:

My first date with Emma was a campaign stop and I didn't even know it. We weren't 10 minutes into dinner when she asked me, "Do you think I'd make a good President?"

I replied, "Well, you're nice and personable."

She said, "Yeah. Plus, you know me personally and that counts for a lot. I'll bet that you don't know anyone else running, at least not personally."

She had me there. "True."

She said, "Then will you write me in for President, next election?"

I replied, "What are your stances on the issues? Plus, don't you need to be 35 to run for President?"

She said, "You'd think I have my work cut out for me, but I don't really. Only about 1.2 million people voted in the last election, and I only have to convince half of them. I've already started a blog, and if I can just convince 600,000 people to vote for me, then I might actually be the next President."

"Uh…"

"Once you know how to work the system, it's amazing to see how easy it can be." She gave me a wink and took a drink.

"I'm pretty sure that more than 1.2 million people voted, last election."

She shook her head. "Forty percent of the eligible public voted. That's 1.2 million."

"There are more than 3 million eligible voters in the United States."

She gave me a strange look, then said, with a straight face, "There's only about 3 million people, total, in the United States."

I said, "Think closer to 300 million."

She snorted, then said, "That's like–wait." It dawned on her. She finally figured it out. Right then and there. Her smile turned into the scrunched face of a first-grader who was trying really hard to comprehend multiplication. She asked me, "How many people live on Earth, total?"

I replied, "Something around 6 billion."

"Billion?" she repeated, "As in, a million times a million?"

"No. That would be a trillion."

"A trillion people?"

"A million times a million is a trillion."

She shrugged and said, "Whatever, professor science. Math was never my strong suit."

Simultaneously feeling bad for both of us, I said, "It's okay. Presidents don't need to know math."

"Thank God," she said, and she held up her glass for a toast. I toasted her, and she spent the rest of the meal detailing her political beliefs, which were standard, rank-and-file, right-of-center. As I said, she was very pleasant and gregarious, but I'm attracted to intelligence, and so her candidacy for a second date was weak, at best.


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Happy Presidents Day from George Carlin.