The State of our Disunion

When Congress gave President Bush the authorization to go to war with Iraq, I was skeptical. Not just about the stated reasons for war, but also about the reasons Congress so readily agreed. It seemed to me that the reason members of Congress voted yea had less to do with the reasons put forth by the administration and more to do with getting re-elected. Can we really believe that Cynthia McKenny alone had the insight to recognize the bull coming from the White House?

Here we are 6 years later and Congress has seemingly found their backbone - or have they. More likely they are basing their public statements with an eye towards 2008.

Maybe I'm just cynical. But if we can’t trust our leaders to make intelligent choices, why do we even bother to vote? There’s something wrong with a system that requires our leaders to spend the bulk of their time raising money and running for re-election. It’s very depressing. Rather than vote their conscious, they vote the poll numbers or vote their party.

The problems as I see it are these.
1. Running for office requires too much money. That makes it difficult for any politician, even the honest, conscientious one, to avoid having to spend all their time fundraising.

2. The 2 party system results in gridlock most of the time. The ruling party does everything they can to sabotage the minority party and vice versa. Its not about issues its about winning.

3. We are not being well served by the media. Rather than focus on important issues, we get Natalie, Michael, OJ, TomCat, Federline, Rosie and the Donald. Of course, that’s what we want, they say.

4. Of course the root of all of these problems is us. Negative campaigning works. People vote their party and we have the collective attention span of a two year old.

IMHO we need the following.

1. We need government-funded elections. We need to get past this “Money is the same as speech” argument. It isn’t.
2. We need better candidates for office. How about a selection process at least as rigorous as American Idol. Of course that’s not a perfect system either. (Taylor Hicks)
3. How about a salary and spending cap per party? If they’ve spent their cap, they can’t put up another candidate. I think that would do very well stimulating the creation and growth of other political parties.
4. We need to have a lot more civics education in school. Its sad when the government knows more about you than you know about your government. Scary too.

Of course none of this will happen in my lifetime.