Dear Ms. Applebaum:

Any male child can grow up to be president.

Riiiight, Hillary has no chance and never did. Sure.

Agreed. But not because she is a woman. Because she is who she is.
Not all of the qualifications required to be the big dog are necessarily desirable.

elj

No. Give me a room of 100 first grade boys. In two hours or less I can pick 99 who will never grow up to be president. The one that I don't pick won't necessarily be president either.

Less than one in 10 million people will be president. with 100% confidence I can pick 99 out of a 100 who will never be president.

My first step will be to arrange them into 20 groups of 5, with each 5 to select a team name and a leader. I dunno where it will go from there, but a series of team games will quickly establish who leads, and who follows who. Your first step may vary, but I bet most people will find a way to correctly write off 99% of the boys as unelectable.

You go,Madai.

Actually, your theory works only in the context that the children are blank slates that have no notion of group dynamics except intuition.

However, Boy Scouts taught certain kids to be leaders when the occasion required it. It also taught following the leader when necessary. So a good leader could also be a good follower, even at a young age.

So any existing social dynamic in the your experiment would be offset by any child with the advanced political awareness to be an obedient follower eventhough they harbor the potential and skill to lead.

No, it'll work because only one in twenty million people will be president. If limited to males, only one in 10 million males. On the off chance one of those ten million makes it into my group of 100, my hope is he will stand out. I'm willing to rule out the possiblity that the sample will contain two future presidents as unbelievably rare. After all, rarely are presidents born in the same year as existing presidents.

The chances of the future president ducking to follow to deliberately make me lose this bet, in first grade mind you, are remote.