I have gotten several good ideas from readers (of which at least half I already was working on when I wrote this story, but that just means we are all on the same path.) Some of the ideas I got were good, but impossible. Solve global warming – Carl is a billionaire, not a trillionaire, and billions of people won’t go along with this anyway. He can raise awareness, but he can’t fix it in two years. Nor can he go back to the Moon and Mars, or cure cancer and AIDS.
Other issues can’t be fixed without enough time passing. In the mid-2000s gay marriage was still very unpopular and there was no consensus to decriminalize pot. He can’t do these things on his own. To put it bluntly, a lot of old people will have to die off before we get some of these problems fixed.
Only Congress is allowed to tax, specifically the House of Representatives. Just because Carl thinks a tax is a good idea or a bad idea, he can’t unilaterally change the tax code! The same goes for various government agencies. Many readers have written that Carl needs to abolish the Department of Education, or Energy, or Whatever, depending on the reader’s leanings. That can’t be done without Congressional approval. It is one thing to not create an agency (Homeland Security, TSA) but it is quite another to kill an existing one off. Each agency has massive numbers of constituents, each of which want it to get bigger, not smaller, and each of which will fund lobbyists to fight any change. As for doing some of these things by Executive Order, it’s much easier to create something that way than it is to un-create it. That’s how GWB originally created Homeland Security.
A few questions on why Carl was shot. Why wasn’t he wearing his Presidential bulletproof underwear, issued to all Presidents after the Reagan shooting? Well, that’s a bit tougher to investigate, since the Secret Service really isn’t talking about this. A big chunk of the debate is because Obama reportedly wore a suit or overcoat at his inauguration from a famous producer of bulletproof clothing from Medellin, Columbia. They don’t really make the clothing from Kevlar but generally create a liner to the clothing. Kevlar as an undershirt would be very uncomfortable. Even if he had on a Kevlar liner to his tuxedo jacket, if he wears the jacket open, or the shot comes in at the right angle, it can easily slip past the Kevlar on a shot from the front.
Another question is why Carl uses the cane on the same side his leg is bad. You are supposed to use it on the opposite side. Well, not everybody is alike. When I’ve had to use a cane (trick knee - sometimes I need a knee brace, and I’ve used a cane on occasion) I’ve been more comfortable using it on the same side. This reminds me of the movie El Dorado, where both John Wayne & Robert Mitchum get shot in the leg, and end up using a single crutch each. Both actors spend the entire movie using it one side or the other, even joking about it in the last scene.