Frank Zappa
“If I Was President”
If I was President? I think I'd do a fine job.
Because first of all I don't owe anything to anybody. And I don't believe in the platform of any of the parties. So I would start from scratch and make it up as it went along. And there's no way that anybody in any public office is gonna get 100% of the public liking his or her policies, and so you just take that as a given. And you can do things.
If I were going to run here's exactly what I would do. First of all I would file as a candidate of no party. And all I would do is raise enough money to get on the ballot in every state. And I wouldn't campaign.
And I happen to think that the news media would call me up to ask me what do you think about this. And I would tell 'em. And let the other guys spend their money and argue about it. But just being completely outside of the circuit I think you could get enough information into the marketplace of ideas to let them know what you thought about various things. And the day that they got to go to the poll, when they're just sick to death of next season's Willie Hortons or whatever it's going to be, there would be an alternative. There'd just be something that you could check on the box that would enable you to vote against the rest of what politics is.
Whether it's me or somebody else, I think that that is the key to breaking the way politics is conducted in the United States, 'cause it's going to be a long time before any of these practitioners really change the election procedure. They're not gonna make it fairer, they're not gonna make the expenditures lower, they're just gonna try and keep it going the way it is. And the only hope that this democracy—and I use the word advisedly in the case of the United States, 'cause it's almost evaporated—the only way that you can have a choice is for somebody to come up from nowhere and do it just the way I described, completely outside the system, as simply as possible.
And that would enable the voters that are fed up who are always saying one of the reasons why they don't go to the polls is 'cause there is no choice—if they know that this time they would have a choice, no matter whether— whatever the candidate is. Just to have a third box that you could check.
These guys with these— the helmet hair, these custom molded guys that have sprayed the hair never moves and they all do like this and like— have these terrible little hand gestures that they got out of a comic book someplace and they say the same things and . . . uh, it's boring and it's insincere. I find it hard to believe that 250 million people in this country really buy into that. I think that the reason why they're able to hang on to their positions or get into the office in the first place is because there isn't anybody willing to look at them and say, "You're fake! You're just— just that. I feel sorry for you that you have to live your life being a fake."