Our First Hawaiian President

So this person, Barack Obama, who was born on an island in the Pacific Ocean, halfway out in the middle of nowhere, just became the head of the executive branch of the U.S. Government. In other words, the President. The island was barely a state at the time.

He beat a guy, John McCain, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone, not quite in the middle of nowhere, but certainly halfway between the Americas, north and south. He later moved to Arizona. The last person from Arizona who ran for President, Barry Goldwater, was born there when it was still a territory, not yet a state.

Two people that I know of have run for high office from Alaska: Mike Gravel, a resident of the state before it was a state, and vp candidate; and Sarah Palin, of recent memory, who was better looking and perhaps easier to get along with. Her family moved there when she was practically a newborn just five years after it joined the union.

You have to be born in the United States of USA if you want to be Prez or VPrez, but any of our territories will do just as well. I suppose you could be from Pago Pago (just on our side of the International Date Line), the Northern Mariana Islands (just east of the Philippines) or the U.S. Virgin Islands (in the Caribbean Sea’s Lesser Antilles).

Even Little Diomede Island; it’s within sight of Russia’s Big Diomede Island, which is barely across the International Date Line. They’re just two miles and one day apart, which means you can see yesterday or tomorrow, depending.