How You Can Run for President

By John Gilhooly

You don't need to be rich or powerful to run for President. Ordinary citizens can meet the legal requirements and launch their own campaigns. This book is packed with humor and useful information such as filing deadlines, what to say to other presidential candidates, debating, dealing with the news media, how the Internet has changed political campaigns and what to say if your bid for office is unsuccessful. The final chapter is about how both winners and losers in the race for the presidency can have an impact on the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9780982560273

Book preview

impact

I The presidential bug bites

1- Guess what, dear …

You are sitting in a porch swing with your spouse on a cool autumn day and you say, I think I’ll run for President.

Your mate has heard you say a lot of crazy things over the years but this is one of the craziest.

What?

I think I’ll run for President.

"Of what?"

The United States.

Mary takes a deep breath. You’ve got too much time on your hands, Henry. Go take a nap and come back to your senses.

I want to do something exciting. This is my chance.

Mow the lawn or walk down to the drugstore. Don’t speak nonsense.

But Henry isn’t listening because he is already thinking about what he’ll say when he tells the world he’s seeking the presidency.

YOU can run for President! You don’t need to be a Hillary Clinton, a Donald Trump or someone named Bush who has a brother and a father who were both Presidents, you can run!

It doesn’t matter if you don’t have millions of dollars in the bank or don’t have the backing of powerful people, you can run!

For $1,000 you can get your name on the ballot in New Hampshire. (Some other states also charge fairly modest filing fees.) And you must meet the constitutional requirements for President: you must be a natural born citizen of the United States, a U.S. resident for the last fourteen years and at least 35 years old.

But hold on a minute. Take a deep breath and analyze the situation. Yes, assuming you can come up with the $1,000 and you meet the other requirements, you can run for President, but do you really want to run?

Novelist and essayist Gore Vidal suggested, Any American who is prepared to run for President should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing do.

And if you are thinking of running as a Republican in the 2016 campaign, beware. It is shaping up as the most unpredictable, highly contested race in years. In early 2015, conventional wisdom suggested politicians such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie might be among those leading the pack into the primaries. As 2015 drew to a close, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and billionaire Donald Trump seemed to be the candidates to beat. And there were thirteen other serious candidates still in the field. With the vote split so many ways, no wonder two outsiders were able to lead the early polling.

So, if you plan to seek the Republican nomination, you might be lost in this field. Or, if you look at it from a different perspective, you could figure it is still anybody’s race and you’ve got a chance.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton was leading the way followed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Vice President Joseph Biden had