President Me: The America That’s in My Head

By Adam Carolla (HarperCollins, 275 pp., $26.99)

Adam Carolla, who by his own account neither reads nor writes, has already written his third book, and it serves a higher purpose than the previous works in the Carolla canon.

In President Me, Carolla, who co-wrote and starred in the great Los Angeles fighting film The Hammer in 2007 and spent 11 years building the sex call-in show Loveline into a national franchise, forms his exploratory committee for a presidential run. Like real candidates’ exploratory committees, this one is more of a legal fiction than an actual committee. The book is a trial balloon describing “what each department would look like in a Carolla administration,” he writes. “So chuck that Bible, get a Juggs magazine for me to put my hand on, and swear me in.”

The presidential hopeful and creator of Mangria, a blend of alcohols so ungodly that merely describing the ingredients can induce dry heaves, has many worthy proposals that would increase freedom in the United States. The Carolla Department of Transportation would get Americans moving again:

Drivers spend so much time rubbernecking at stupid road signs and people being pulled over for nothing violations just to fill the coffers of the city government that traffic is constantly slow or at a standstill. If we could eliminate those distractions, we’d all get to work on time and get this economy going again. This is no joke. Think about all the lost productivity that comes with people going zero miles per hour listening to “Asscrack and Backsack in the Morning” on their daily commute. We should all be out there driving like champions.
Here’s one way to tell if you’re driving how I want you to — nay, how America needs you to. Whenever I drive my dad around, I see him mashing his feet into the floor mat. The old man is using imaginary brakes because I’m driving so hard. When your passenger is trying to stop the vehicle with his feet like Fred Flintstone, that is the ultimate tip of the cap.

As these lines indicate — in particular the admission that local government is the truly aggressive thief of personal property — Carolla is no Washington insider. The candidate and his lovely family live in the same county he was born and raised in. Many readers will bail out when they learn it is Los Angeles County, Calif. In fact, one of Carolla’s many talents is a unique ability to evoke workaday Los Angeles, and his self-created wealth has not dimmed his vision in this respect:

All working-class jobs break down into two categories. The first is mind-numbing. These are the jobs like being a night watchman. You’re all alone, and besides a little talk radio, you’ve got nothing to stimulate you unless a junkie tries to break into whatever you’re protecting and stab you. Then there are the punishment jobs. Jobs that make you think you must have been a really awful person in a past life and your karma has come due. I was talking to Josh Homme, the lead singer from Queens of the Stone Age, who if you don’t know is a giant pale redhead. He spent some time as a roofer in Palm Springs. He must have been a serial rapist in his last life because that’s a tough pull. Scraping hot, dusty tarpaper off a roof in cloudless 120-degree Palm Springs when you’re seven feet tall and have the skin tone of Conan O’Brien is torture.

The entertainment-industrial complex frequently tries to depict the City of Angels. But the depictions — even supposedly wised-up or biting versions like The Player, Entourage, Pulp Fiction, and Keeping Up With the Kardashians — are cartoons unrecognizable to anybody with actual experience of the place. Carolla alone creates a persuasive version of L.A. as a living, driving, working place where people of various ethnicities, businesses, and religions mingle warily, blessed by nature’s bounty but oppressed by stupid government. On his late, great KLSX morning radio show, and now in his podcast — which in May 2011 was certified by Guinness World Records as planet Earth’s most downloaded podcast, with a total of more than 60 million downloads — Carolla brings the real Los Angeles to America. President Me is aimed at the entire U.S. electorate, but that sense of place still comes through in convention-worthy rants about the tattooed layabout staffers at the L.A. Zoo in Griffith Park; rear-windshield decals memorializing drivers’ dead homies; a dear friend of the author/candidate’s, whose laziness has rendered him unhireable all over town (Carolla is an experienced builder who currently hosts Spike’s Mr. Fixit reality show Catch a Contractor), but who still believes his plight is the fault of others; and more.

But in President Me, the family man and successful entrepreneur has bigger visions for America’s fundamental transformation. Carolla would get rid of air bags on the (actually fairly well-supported) premise that people drive less carefully the safer they feel. “You know who doesn’t text while driving,” he writes, “uninsured Mexicans behind the wheels of gardening trucks.” Although he supports gay marriage, he would take bold action against the maximalist position of gay-marriage activism: “Eventually some gay activist is going to sue because he’s not allowed to get married at the Crystal Cathedral.” Carolla would ease the burden of airport security through a reality show:

We’ve all seen the guy who’s late for his flight, just made his way through security, and is rushing to get to the gate and trying to get himself together after taking off the belt, emptying his pockets, taking out the laptop, losing the shoes, removing the hat, and being grunted at by Mo’Nique’s angrier sister. Well, this show is about families competing to see who can get their s**t back together while on the move and dodging other passengers. You have to get from the end of security to your gate in the fastest time. Imagine it. Mama’s yelling at the kids to get their knapsack packed up, Grandma loses a shoe on the way. And then when they get to the gate the judges start giving them the once-over, twice. That’s when the scrutineering begins. (And yes that is a word. Like “behymen.”) They’re taking a look at Dad’s belt saying, “You missed a loop.” Then Mom starts yelling at Dad, “This is why we practice, Bill.” It’ll be great. It’s Family Feud meets Wipeout in an airport. I call it — Terminal Velocity.

But Carolla is no small-government ideologue. He would take bold action against cash bars at wedding receptions and the depressingly slovenly way people dress and behave in airports. The book is dotted with clip-art “ManDate” icons (intercapitalization in the original) to indicate new laws, executive orders, and policies. In his most forward-looking proposal, Carolla would have the Department of Commerce’s weights and measures division subject all adult American males to annual measurements of penis size by volume (using displacement of water as a proxy, in a procedure that must be read to be believed) and issue them ATF-style windbreakers listing “position among the 112 million eighteen-plus males in America on it. If your number is readable from a distance, you’re in pretty good standing because the median would be around 56 million.” It is not entirely clear what national problem this would solve, and it’s likely that Carolla’s opponents will seize on this proposal as fodder for their attack ads. But it is almost certainly true that American men (and probably many women) spend more time thinking about this matter than about bending the cost curve of average health-care rates nationwide, the National Water Quality Initiative, or the name of the Redskins — all of which have been given rapt attention by the current president.

It should be clear from the above that the co-creator of The Man Show is not to everybody’s taste. Your enjoyment of the book will be in large part a function of how much you like his shows — from which much material here has been repurposed. But President Me’s real value as a campaign playbook is in the material that doesn’t aim directly for the funny bone. The story of Carolla’s experiences trying to get his beverage label approved by the ATF is unbelievably maddening. Parents of school-age children will see their own stories in Carolla’s critique of the national anti-bullying campaign — which as he notes, combines endless talk and an ever-expanding definition of bullying with a total lack of response when there are actual violent bullies preying on students. “A month doesn’t go by without some black-and-white footage of two kids kicking the s**t out of another kid on a bus, or worse, a parent coming on to the bus and smacking around the girl who called her kid fat on Facebook.”

Carolla is contemptuous of the media’s obsession with presidential candidates’ relatability, but he has an understanding of pocketbook issues that none of the other 2016 hopefuls seem to share. Every election cycle comes festooned with studies and news articles purporting to show that the voters are angrier than ever this election, and with his ability to transmute everyday outrage into comedy, Carolla could be the dark horse America is waiting for. “When a politician tosses off a mediocre one-liner during the State of the Union or a debate, people think he’s a genius,” the candidate writes. “But if you put an actual comedian in office, he’d be the funniest politician of all time.”

— Tim Cavanaugh is news editor of National Review Online. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.