The Kid Who Ran For President Read online

  Pete sat down on the living room couch and asked a few questions. When he was finished, he asked me if I would mind a little friendly advice. I told him I would appreciate any tips he might have.

  “You kids are new at this,” he said. “Lots of people want you, Moon. But there’s something you should know. Nobody out there is your friend. Everybody wants a piece of you. To sell newspapers or magazines. To improve their TV or radio ratings, or get suckers to click on their web site. To make money. All I’m sayin’ is, be careful. Don’t trust anybody. America chews up celebrities and spits ’em out. I hate to see a nice kid like you get burned.”

  I thanked Pete for the advice. It was obvious that he was more than just a reporter. I could count on him as a friend.

  As Pete pushed his way out the door and through the throng of reporters and cameramen on the front lawn, I spotted Gus, our mailman. Lane and I ushered him inside.

  “They say dogs with rabies are dangerous!” Gus said, handing me a thick stack of letters. “Some guy just offered me fifty bucks to give you a note.”

  “What did you tell him, Gus?”

  “I told him he could get it here a lot cheaper if he’d just put a stamp on it.”

  Usually the mail is a bunch of catalogs and coupons and other junk. But the pile of mail Gus handed me was a bunch of letters in regular-size envelopes with my name and address written on them by hand. I pulled out one envelope and ripped it open.

  A check for $34.25 fluttered to the ground. I ripped open another envelope. It was from a kid in Arkansas who put up a lemonade stand. $52.50 in bills and change tumbled out.

  Lane and I put all the envelopes on the floor and started furiously ripping them open. There were about fifty of them. Some were simply addressed JUDSON MOON, MADISON, WISCONSIN.

  Some of the letters were from kids who put up lemonade stands. Other kids had car washes, bake sales, or yard sales. Kids were actually selling their own toys to raise money for me!

  With each letter was a check or a bunch of bills. The largest contribution was $103.

  We counted up all the money and it came to $2,568.75. We felt like we had won the lottery.

  “You’re a genius,” I told Lane.

  “And you,” Lane said, clapping a hand on my back, “are becoming America’s hero.”

  In the next few days, Americans must have guzzled a lot of lemonade. Poor Gus showed up at the door with an enormous sackful of envelopes. He looked like Santa Claus. Money and gifts poured in from all over the country.

  Deep in the pile was a card that said I had a package waiting for me at the post office, and that I should come get it right away. I went over there to pick it up and the package was a dog — a little cocker spaniel I named Chester. I always wanted a dog, so at least something came out of running for president.

  Lane took care of all the details. He opened a bank account and carefully recorded each donation. He rented office space and coordinated volunteers to run it. An artist was hired to draw a picture of the moon with a photo of my face in the middle of it. The logo was used on our bumper stickers, T-shirts, buttons, and flyers.

  The campaign was picking up speed, and Chelsea was acting more and more friendly to me at school. She came up to me at my locker one day and said she had something important she wanted to talk about.

  “I’ve been reading up on the First Ladies,” she said, “and they always have something they’re crusading for. Y’know — keeping America beautiful, reading, women’s rights, and stuff.”

  “Is there some cause you want to crusade for?” I asked.

  “Well, I was thinking, do you know how many silkworms die to make a silk blouse?”

  “I have no idea, Chelsea.”

  “Lots!” she exclaimed.

  “So you want people to boycott silk clothes?” It seemed like a weird cause to me.

  “No!” she exclaimed, horrified. “I love silk clothes! I want to lead a crusade in favor of better conditions for those poor silkworms.”

  At first I thought she was putting me on, but the vacant look in her eyes told me she was absolutely serious. For all I know, silkworms are an endangered species.

  “I say go for it, Chelsea,” I said. “If you believe in a cause, you have to fight for it.”

  Mom and Dad could no longer pretend I was just fooling around. When Dad knocked on my bedroom door one night at bedtime and asked if we could have a little talk, I was surprised. The last time we had a man-to-man, I had just run over his vegetable garden with the snowblower.

  Dad sat down on my bed and fiddled with the globe on my night table.

  “I don’t know much about politics, Judd,” he said. “All I know is cardboard boxes. But somehow, I figure they’re pretty much the same.”

  This I wanted to hear.

  “When I sell a customer a pallet of boxes, I want those boxes to be strong. That’s the main thing. If the boxes are weak and fall apart, that customer will never buy a box from me again.”

  “The president has to be strong too, right, Dad?”

  “Right. But it’s not good enough to just be strong. A box has to have other good qualities. It has to hold lots of stuff. It has to stack easily. It can’t weigh too much. You have to be able to put it together quickly. And it has to be labeled clearly so people know exactly what’s inside it.”

  “A president has to be a lot like a box, right, Dad?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  For just about the first time in my life, Dad and I were communicating … in an odd sort of way.

  “Dad?” I asked. “What would you do if customers really liked a box, but you knew perfectly well that the box was poor quality?”

  “Simple,” he replied instantly. “I’d sell him the box.”

  “Even though you know it’s not right?”

  “The customer is always right, Judd,” he said. “That’s the first rule of selling. You’ve got to give the customers what they want.”

  “But what if the customers are stuck with a piece of garbage?”

  “That’s their problem,” he explained as he got up from the bed. “They get what they pay for. Maybe next time they’ll use a little sense and pick a better box.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said. He flipped off my light and I thought about that before falling asleep.

  It says right there in the Constitution …

  “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

  After the Associated Press article appeared, lots of newspapers ran follow-up stories that included that passage from the Constitution. They said my candidacy was nothing more than a big joke, because by law no twelve-year-old could be president of the United States.

  But Lane didn’t think it was a joke.

  “The Constitution can be changed, y’know,” he said as we settled in for our next strategy session at the tree house, which we had renamed Tranquility Base.

  “Yeah, right,” I scoffed. “We’ll just go to Washington, sneak in there with some Wite-Out, and get rid of the part that says the president has to be thirty-five years old.”

  “No, Moon. Haven’t you heard of constitutional amendments?”

  “Sure I have,” I said, not very sure what they were. “The Bill of Rights and stuff.”

  “The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution,” Lane explained. “There have been twenty-seven altogether.”

  “They changed the Constitution twenty-seven times!?”

  “Yeah. See, the guys who wrote the Constitution knew the world was gonna change. They figured that if the Constitution couldn’t be changed with it, the people of the future might weird out and have another revolution. So the Fifteenth Amendment gave people the right to vote regardless of r
ace. The Nineteenth gave women the right to vote, and the Twenty-sixth gave eighteen-year-olds the right to vote.”

  “How do you know so much, Lane?”

  “I read. I study. I learn. You should try it sometime, Moon.”

  “So how do you change the Constitution?”

  Lane pulled out our history textbook and leafed through it until he found the passage in the Constitution he was looking for.

  “Listen to this, Moon,” he read. “‘The Congress, whenever two-thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution.’”

  He ran his finger down a few lines until he came to the key words. “Oh, here it is … ‘when ratified by the Legislatures of three-fourths of the several States.’ So two-thirds of the Congress has to propose the amendment, and then the legislatures of three-fourths of the states have to vote in favor of it.”

  It didn’t seem very likely that could ever happen, but the next day a very interesting article appeared on the editorial page of the New York Times….

  LET THE KID RUN!

  By Louis Bixby

  The recent presidential candidacy of young Judson Moon of Madison, Wisconsin, has been treated like a national joke in the press. Everyone knows the president of the United States must be 35 years old, so why doesn’t this little boy go back to his lemonade stand and leave this important political stuff to us grown-ups?

  I have one thing to say about that — let the kid run!

  It is time for someone to propose a constitutional amendment to eliminate all age restrictions on running for political office.

  This is a free country, last time I looked. All of us have the right to assemble, say or publish anything we want, choose our religion, and enjoy all the other unalienable rights granted in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Shouldn’t we all have the right to run for political office?

  Why is a 35-year-old man — or woman — qualified to be president but a 34-year-old is not? Perhaps the best person to run the country is 30 years old, or even 20 years old.

  Who knows? Maybe the best person to lead us is 12 years old. Probably not. But shouldn’t that young person have the right to try?

  The right to run for office should not be withheld due to sex, race, or age. Judson Moon should have the right to run for president if he wants to. If the kid gets trounced, as he most certainly will, it will be a valuable life lesson for him. And perhaps for us all.

  The media had sort of lost interest in the Moon & June campaign after the first wave of publicity, but this was like a match had been dropped into a pool of gasoline. The next day you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing people arguing about the “lemonade stand amendment,” as they were calling it.

  Some callers would chant “LET THE KID RUN! LET THE KID RUN!” and hang up. Others would say how children don’t have the maturity, intelligence, or experience to handle a position of responsibility.

  “I’ve got a twelve-year-old son,” one lady commented, “and he can’t even drink soup without dribbling it all over his shirt!”

  “Thank God that lady’s kid ain’t runnin’ for president!” another caller cracked.

  The newspaper columnists jumped into the debate. Celebrities were asked to take a stand on the issue. Picket lines formed outside state capitals with people marching around holding LET THE KID RUN! signs.

  USA Today took a poll and found that 64% of all Americans and 99% of all kids felt there should be a constitutional amendment eliminating all age restrictions on running for political office. Congress debated the issue on C-SPAN, and the nation was glued to the tube like we had landed an astronaut on Mars or something.

  The children of America decided it was up to them to get this amendment passed. At first they protested peacefully at home and at school. Then things started to get ugly.

  All across America, kids refused to clean up their rooms unless their parents supported the lemonade stand amendment. They stopped putting their clothes in the hamper. They swallowed their food without chewing it well first.

  They refused to bundle up when they went outside. They went swimming immediately after eating. Some of them even ate while they were swimming — the ultimate act of defiance.

  Newspapers reported that vegetable sales were way down at supermarkets. Kids were simply refusing to eat them.

  Lane loved it. He seemed to really enjoy the fact that America was doing something in response to us.

  Me, I didn’t even care anymore. To tell you the truth, I was getting sick of running for president. I was beginning to feel like I was only doing it to please Lane. Running for president wasn’t a goof anymore, and it wasn’t fun anymore, either.

  I couldn’t go anywhere without being followed. Reporters were permanently camped out in the lot across the street from my house. Every time our front door would open, they’d rush over, waving their cameras and notebooks and microphones.

  My parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were being hassled for interviews. Mrs. Syers couldn’t sit on her porch anymore without holding a press conference. Everybody I ever knew was being asked to describe what I was like.

  One day, as a joke, I opened up the front door, poked my head out, and screamed at the reporters across the street, “Give me liberty or give me death!”

  The next day headlines appeared in all the papers — MOON CAN’T TAKE THE PRESSURE! and MOON IS LOONEY! and JUDSON PUT ON SUICIDE WATCH! It was crazy.

  In the end, public opinion convinced the Senate and House of Representatives that the issue had to be brought up for a vote. Three weeks after the editorial appeared in the New York Times, the legislatures of forty-two states ratified Amendment XXVIII to the Constitution …

  “The right of citizens of the United States to run for elected office in any primary or other election shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age.”

  Whether I wanted to or not, I was officially in the race for president of the United States.

  Naturally, I was not the only person running for president of the United States. President George White was hoping to be reelected for a second term, of course. He’s a Republican from Ohio, an older guy with big jowly cheeks that wiggle when he talks.

  President White was an okay president, I guess. He hadn’t gotten America into any wars, or at least any world wars, during his four years in office.

  A lot of people don’t like him, though. Before he was elected, he had promised he was going to lower taxes, balance the budget, and solve all of America’s problems. But three years into his presidency, we seemed to have all the same problems and a few new ones, too.

  The Democrats seemed to be against everything President White did simply because he was a Republican. Republicans were always criticizing him because they said he wasn’t Republican enough, whatever that meant.

  Sometimes I think people didn’t like President White simply because he was the president and they weren’t.

  To make things worse for the president, in January during a ceremony on the White House lawn, his dog went to the bathroom on the ambassador from New Zealand. It was pretty hilarious, and the video of it got something like ten million views on YouTube.

  Some commentators said the president can’t be expected to manage the country when he can’t even manage his own dog.

  Anyway, his approval rating went way down after that incident.

  The Democratic challenger was Senator Herbert Dunn of West Virginia. You’d recognize him right away because his hair looks like it was made of Styrofoam and surgically fused to his head. Lane and I always say he must comb his hair with a blowtorch.

  Senator Dunn was always attacking President White, saying his policies were leading to the decline and fall of civilization and stuff like that. He was angry all the time. A real downer. I couldn’t believe anyone would ever vote for him, but he’d been a Senator for about a hundred years, so people must like him. In West Virginia, anyway.

  To be perfect
ly honest, I thought President White and Senator Dunn were a couple of windbags.

  In February, USA Today took a poll of the American people and this was the result …

  President White: 53%

  Senator Dunn: 43%

  Judson Moon: 1%

  Other: 3%

  “One percent of the vote!” I complained to Mrs. Syers. “That’s pathetic! We’re doing even worse than Other!”

  “Honey,” she said, “do you realize a hundred million people are gonna vote on November seventh? You get one percent of that and you got a million votes! A million grown-ups who would vote for you, a snot-nosed, twelve-year-old kid, to be president of the United States! Think about that, child!”

  Meanwhile, the money kept pouring in from kids all over America. Poor Gus hurt his back lugging all those sacks to my house every day. In March, he turned in his resignation to the post office. Somebody told me Gus had decided to enter politics himself.

  I came home from school one day and there were a dozen or so kids helping out with all the mail, working like little gerbils. Lane called them his “Moonies.”

  “How’d you get them to do this?” I asked Lane.

  “I promised them you would establish a minimum weekly allowance for kids,” he replied.

  “I can’t do that! That’s their parents’ decision!”

  “It’s just a campaign promise, Moon,” he said, as if I was dumb. “You don’t have to actually do it.”

  By April, Lane said we had enough money to buy some air time and do TV commercials. This was my favorite part about running for president. I’m a natural ham, and it was really cool to shoot the commercials and watch them on TV.

  Mrs. Syers and I made a whole bunch of goofy commercials together, but the one I liked best I did by myself. It was shot at the local high school football field. I started at the one-yard line to show that I had one percent of the vote so far. As I talked, I walked upfield with a football in my arm. Lane and I made up this script …