57 Candidates and Nothing On

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.