Never have I seen so many candidates with so few robes. With nearly 20 major declared candidates between the two major parties, and two credible third-party challenges possible (including multi-millionaire Michael Bloomberg), you would think there would be someone to vote for.
Instead, we have 22 candidates I'd be quite willing to vote against in favor of the lesser of two evils. How can there be no lesser of 22 evils? I don't understand it. In fact, out of my quite wide and diverse social circle (40+ adults), I only know four people enthusiastic about a candidate, and two of them favor Ron Paul. Of course, those supporters are a priest and a comic book store owner, so I'm not sure how representative that is of America at large--but I digress.
My mom has an idea for a fix. I didn't like it at first--it seemed downright un-American--but it's really grown on me.
She says that the problem is that Americans get to vote in the primaries. The country was much better off, she says, before the 1960's, when the primary system really began in earnest. Before then, party insiders met in "smoke-filled rooms" and decided what candidate had the best chance of winning the general election. That candidate would then be trotted out at the convention, at which point election season would begin.
The benefits to this system are manifold: we would get candidates closer to the middle of political thought, instead of now, when each side plays to their base so hard that we ended up last time with extreme-left John Kerry and extreme-right George W. Bush, neither of whom represented American thinking at all. That election produced enormous feelings of animosity, as did the one before.
The day after the 2006 congressional election, the presidential election season began. Incredible amounts of money have been raised, destroying the public-financing system. Congress passes no meaningful legislation because (a) so many senators are out campaigning and (b) each candidate wants to complain that their pet bill needs to get passed, so they need to be president, quietly taking steps to make sure that their pet bill does *not* get passed when the rhetoric is still needed.
Everyone's talking about changing the primary calendar, creating a rotating system based on geographical zones, finding a better primary debate format. Instead, let's return to smoke-filled rooms. None of the would-be emperors have anything on.
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3 comments:
Ouch! Wish it weren't true!
Ron Paul scares the heck out of me. Looking deeper than his anti-war comments in the debates reveals some very troubling stances on issues.
Barack Obama impresses me. I like that he actually seems to THINK.
The days of smoke filled rooms are gone. Now Disney won't even let smoking be shown in their movies.
Love,
Your big sister
Ron Paul scares me, too. The fact that a libertarian comic book store owner supports him is warning enough ;^)
Obama is part of the problem I'm talking about. He claims to be the ideas candidate, but IIRC, Senate records show he votes with his own party nearly 90% of the time, the most of any Dem. senator running for the nomination. This isn't the picture of a moderate. He invokes the name of God well when orating, which may draw some on the right to attend to his words, but his votes show that he's basically a staunch Democratic loyalis, not an independent thinker. (On the Republican side, Brownback actually breaks 90% party loyalty by vote, well into "scary" territory, in my opinion.)
By statistics, McCain is the closest thing to a moderate we have in either party--and it isn't close enough to draw my vote.
Love,
Your little brother
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