PC: Thomas Paine, President of the United States

Forgive me if this topic's already been done, but I haven't seen it around and I was wondering about it. So!

Is a Thomas Paine presidency plausible? What would have to change for this to come about?

Once in office, what would his policies/the ramifications of those policies be? What would be the reaction from other Americans and from the rest of the world?
 
Actually, yes he would have been.

"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

The bolded part is what I like to call 'the Alexander Hamilton clause'.

That said--no way would Paine ever have run, much less won.
 
If Paine can keep his religious opinions to himself, he might do better.

(He lost his Revolution-era popularity with "The Age of Reason," which took issue with Judaism and Christianity.)
 
Given that he felt more at home in revolutionary France then in post-revolutionary America, I would say that a Paine presidency is way, way out there in the oort clouds of plausibility.
 
It's not impossible, you just need an earlier POD. Maybe if the revolution drags on for a decade or so the populace will become more and more radicalized until the American Revolution more closely resembles the French one. Then Paine's views wouldn't be so far out of the mainstream. Of course, this butterflies the Constitution and thus the office of President. But you could see Paine as the leader of a more radical United States analog.
 
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