Monday is the President's Day holiday, which means just one thing for a Russian adoptee I know: The annual discussion of why he can't be the president of the United States.

He is an American citizen now, he's up on his current events and he has great leadership skills. But he lacks the one thing the rules say he needs to have to run: Being born in the U.S.

My usually line of defense is to point out the other things he could be: the founder of a company, like Jerry Yang of Yahoo! or Sergey Brin at Google, immigrants from Taiwan and Russia, respectively (though neither adopted). He could even go to Japan to run a company: Several years back Sony named Sir Howard Stringer, a Welshman who had been heading an American company, to be its CEO. (This latter strategy has the added benefit of perhaps ending another long-running debate: Why I won't spend every dime I have on videogame systems. Sony makes PlayStation, and I'm guessing one would be part of the fringe benefits.) I point out that he could run for local or state office.

But no, the problem in this Russian adoptee's eyes is that it's just not fair that he can't be president of the United States. And the more I think about it, the more I agree.

Look at the rules: You can be president of America if only one of your parents was a citizen. Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan father and a mother born in Kansas, has thrown his hat into the ring for 2008. But Austria-born Arnold Schwarzenegger, 38th governor of California, is out of luck.

I recently discovered that there was a loophole when the Constitution of the United States was created in 1787: Presidential candidates could be either natural-born citizens or a citizen at the time of the Constitution's adoption. Were the founding fathers worried about not having enough qualified candidates? Maybe there's a presidential scholar out there who can explain this one to me.

So, adoptive parents of America, how about it? Does anybody else think they have a candidate for 2052 in the house?