The American Spectator

Reader Mail

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The Horatio Alger story that is Arnold Schwarzenegger's rise from rags in Austria to riches in America illustrates nicely the appeal the United States holds for scores of foreign born émigrés who have and will remove to these shores to realize what they understand is their fundamental right to direct their own fates. In these, we see anew our founders' fundamental understanding of what is written in the Declaration of Independence: that the notion of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness inheres in the nature of being human -- that this is the condition of our being, it is inarguable, and it is, indeed, universal.

The prohibition against a foreign-born President, however, is one that needs to be preserved.

It needs to be preserved because it is the best expression of the universality of the rights championed in the Declaration and the Constitution.

That is, Arnold Schwarzenegger may rise to the office of the Governor of California because the freedoms preserved in this country offer a reward for hard work and guarantee more hard work for the granting of that reward.

But we believe fundamentally that the rights we preserve and uphold in the U.S. are those also already being denied in other places.

If Mr. Schwarzenegger wishes to run for President of anywhere, then, perhaps it ought to be Austria.

p>Last time I checked, Europe could do with a dose of the enthusiasm for individual liberty that Mr. Schwarzenegger brings to the office in California. br> -- Gregory Borse br> Peru, Indiana /p>

I have no love for either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jennifer Granholm, and would not like to see either become President. Moreover, I share the general unease over amending the Constitution for the benefit of just one person.

p>Even so, I can't buy George Neumayr's arguments against allowing foreign-born U.S. citizens to run for President. First off, while I don't much like Schwarzenegger or Granholm, I have no reason at all to question either person's patriotism or loyalty to the United States. Second, we've already had at least two foreign-born Secretaries of State (Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright). If we trusted them with control of American foreign policy, it's hard to imagine why they couldn't be trusted in the White House. br> --

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Foreign Policy, John McCain, Hollywood, Constitution, Law, Military, Iraq, NATO, Libertarianism