It’s a problem familiar to sports fan across the globe. Surinam just doesn’t have enough professional baseball players to make the World Series; Cambodia’s footballers have never made the World Cup finals; Trinidad & Tobago struggles every four years to qualify for the Winter Olympics.
A similar phenomenon has been found in politics. The United States of America, despite its plucky bravado and excellent teeth, simply doesn’t have enough people to be able to put two high-calibre opponents together every four years for an election.
‘It’s just a numbers thing,’ said weirdly coiffed pollster Frank Luntz. ‘To be able to find two candidates, each with intelligence, charisma, normal-sized hands, human hair and the ability to stay awake for long periods, you’d need a population of, ooh, let me think, about a trillion? Trillion sounds about right.’
This November will see a particularly dismal competition, with an orange fascist competing with a narcoleptic pensioner. It’s America’s version of tramp-fighting – two losers slugging it out to be crowned the Least Bad Candidate.
It wasn’t always like this. In the 1960s America was highly regarded for putting men on the moon and hosing down protesters with water cannons. Those were the Golden Years, when beautiful women would sleep with the President voluntarily. Since then the picture has soured. Most Americans don’t have basic healthcare provision, half the population is so poorly educated that they think Jesus spoke English and Piers Morgan is taken seriously.
‘Whatever the outcome in November, one thing is certain,’ Luntz said. ‘We’re all as f*cked as a Bill Clinton intern.’
