Burn It Down!

I wrote this piece during the Obama/Romney Campaign. That campaign was a gentile exercise in democracy compared to the current one.

Campaign season always makes me cranky.

Campaigns always turn ugly. Candidates should run their own campaign and lay off of the half-truths and lies about their competitors, but they never do.

They supply very little real information. You should not have to do major research to know how to vote. Side-by-side analysis could be provided by The League of Women Voters or some other nonpartisan group for all electoral contests.

Yard signs, TV ads and mailers are stupid. I don’t need to see pictures of the candidate’s husband or wife, their kids, or their dog.

Negative half-truth sound bites supply no useful information. They are so obviously manipulative, that it’s icky.

The news becomes “the race”, rather than “the issues”. Campaign coverage is more like a soap opera than a discussion of important issues.

The person with the most money and best media coverage wins. This is an astounding and shameful waste of money that could have been spent for something meaningful as our nation continues to drown in red ink.

The two party system is messed up. It puts too much power in hands of unelected party hacks who coerce candidates and elected officials to tow the party line. I favor a “no party” system.

The Electoral College is vestige from another era that diminishes the power of an individual’s vote. It should be replaced by some kind of improved hybrid system that honors the popular vote more heavily, while requiring the candidate to appeal to people in all geographical area of the country.

I think there is lasting genius in American government, but it is coupled with horrible abuses and inadequacies.

A friend’s response to the mess that is American politics and government was, “Burn it down!”

Here we are four years later with an electorate that surprised all of the pundits. They are essentially “burning it down” by turning any sense of political normalcy on its head.