Fishermen make good ... leaders

Virtually everything wrong with this country in recent years can be traced to fishing. More to the point, it has been a painfully long time since the Oval Office was occupied by a true angler. Not a photo-opportunity, fair-weather fishing politician, but a president who loves and understands the sport.

Some of our nation's greatest presidents, most notably the charismatic Calvin Coolidge, were dedicated fishermen.

Why do we need a president who is an angling purist?

True anglers are calm and patient. These are helpful traits for the president, who when irritated by some tinhorn dictator must resist the urge to invade and subjugate.

Anglers value and protect their gear. Let's say the vice president suggests putting the Seventh Fleet on eBay. The angling president would think twice about that.

Dedicated anglers value the environment. They tend not to chant "Drill, Baby, Drill!" A profishing president would know that fishing is irritatingly difficult when done through a layer of crude oil.

Granted, anglers can be colossal windbags, but that makes them perfectly suited for hosting state dinners and negotiating with legislators. They also have a well-earned reputation for stretching the truth, which in turn strengthens their B.S. detectors, another needed trait for a successful presidency.

The Bush Boys, Junior and Senior, sometimes cast for striped bass off the East Coast. However, that doesn't really qualify them as true fishermen, because it's meat fishing (fishing to eat and eating everything you catch). Any dimwit can learn to be a meat fisherman. Meat angling is shock-and-awe-style fishing: target-rich environments, big tackle boxes filled with heavy hardware and high-end fish-finding technology.

Don't get me wrong — some of my best friends are meat fishermen and women. Sarah Palin, who is not one of my best friends, is a meat angler. Alaskan-style meat fishing is an especially ugly form of the sport. Hundreds of men and women jam elbow to elbow along riverbanks during salmon spawning season. They mindlessly cast massive treble hooks over and over, dragging the river bottom in the hopes of snagging dinner. Lobbyists are said to be especially good at it.

What about Joe Biden? Zero interest in fishing. He is a U.S. senator from Delaware, where the stonefly is the official state macroinvertebrate. (Seriously. Look it up.) Trout love stoneflies. Anyone from a state that honors stoneflies has no business not being an angler.

How do our presidential candidates stack up in the angling test?

Barack Obama is clearly not a hook-and-bullet kind of guy. It's hard to think of him in a ragged wool shirt and a crappy old hat, executing a double-haul cast on some wilderness stream. In fact, he doesn't seem like a fellow who would be entirely comfortable baiting his own hook.

Stinkbait!

Made from rotten cheese, rotten flesh, rotten-just-about-anything, stinkbait is absolutely unpresidential. Catfishing with stinkbait is just one small step above carpfishing with canned corn. Frankly, I expect more from a president.

There you have it. Not a decent fisherman or woman among the bunch. But like all good anglers, I'm an eternal optimist. There's always 2012.