The Day It All (Didn't) Happen

We do not live in one of those universes where a teenage president was elected and set everything right, at least for a time. No youthful wave managed to get the Constitution amended so that eighteen year-olds could run for the highest office in the land. There was no teen President, but there was a Prez Rickard.

The young man from Steadfast who made the clocks run on time did spark a national movement. A protest, a bit of political theater, aimed at what he viewed as the corrupt system. Prez went through all the motions of running for president on a campaign of truth and love, just without officially being able to run.

He had been a legal candidate for a local office, hand picked by Boss Smiley who may have been a literal avatar of the political machine. At the very least, Boss Smiley represented it. Youth was the wave of the future, and he had the foresight to want to catch that wave for his own purposes.

Prez went around him and ran straight for the presidency. He named his mother his running mate (she had named him Prez, after all), and said he would appoint that shaman and amateur naturalist, Eagle Free as head of the FBI. He would not be shackled by the forces of Old and Evil.

They tried to stop him, of course. Years before they resorted to the madbomb to sweep the vestiges of democracy away, the Elite went after the Prez. Supergirl saved him from an assassin employing high technology and black magic. The Establishment meant business.

Everything came to a head in August of 1968. The Prez and his followers were in Chicago along with other youth activists. They held their own nominating convention where the Prez beat out Pigasus the Pig, who gave a gracious concession speech through his spokesman. Many historians cite the refusal of the Democratic Party to allow Prez to speak at the national convention as pivotal cause in the escalation of the protests and a factor in the violence that followed.