The election is over... Thank God!

The election is over.  The expected happened.  The sitting President's party typically loses Congress in the last two years of his term.  The American electorate is a bit fickle, but the real issue is the lack of real options to choose from and the lack of a real debate.  Where was the discussion of "climate change" and "immigration" and wars we continue to fight?  Where is the discussion of the issues really affecting people?  Instead we heard the same old negative rhetoric with the same talking points that lack any real nuanced discussion.    

The big issue NEVER discussed that leads such a great country to silliness every two years is “campaign finance reform!”  Very few elected representatives talk about this.  I get it.  The typical thinking on the Hill is that you do what you need to do to get elected and then you can do something.  But the problem then becomes our elections are turned into a “game” of electing representatives, rather than electing the person with the best ideas. 

People are already limited enough by the two-party system.  But now in order to be elected you have to raise hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars to even have a chance.  When will public campaigns without paid advertisements and multiple public forum debates occur?  America is better than this.  And now, we’ve gotten so used to the silliness of our elections and campaigns that the majority of eligible voters do not even vote! 

The system needs to change.  Too many people don’t care and are not given a reason to.  The negative campaigning and lack of real discussion of the issues has continued to make the American election an embarrassment to the world and not what they should be, which is a model of what a Republic could be.   

Election Day

Election day is finally here.  It is always an exciting day to see who will lead our country for the next four years.  I definitely have a preference this election, but I am not one of those people who think that I have to leave the country if the other candidate is elected.  This appears to be an incredibly close election, but from recent polling it seems that the President has a slight edge, but stranger things have happened. 

Personally I can’t wait for it to be over.  The ads alone in Colorado are so full of half-truths and misleading information, and since our state is up for grabs these ads have been extremely prevalent.  I can’t handle the coverage of this election.  It seems that we have lowered the intellectual bar and dismissed truth and embraced simplistic thinking about nuanced and difficult issues.  Everyone seems to have an opinion, but the lack of factual based evidence is sad.  It happens on both sides, but the partisanship in this country is more vitriol and prevalent than ever.   

The solution?  Public campaigns and abolishing the Electoral College.  I believe these two changes in America would help rid us of the negative ads, allow Congress to govern and give voters more choices when electing their governing officials. 

What do you think solutions could be?

One more day...

One day left until the election…  My prediction is that the President will be re-elected.  It seems polls have him up in Ohio, Iowa and Colorado right now.  Granted that those polls are really close, and they are just polls, but this seems to have the feel of re-election to me.  Of course, I did vote for the President, but I really do think we are headed for four more years. 

I know there are many people around the country that will not be happy about this.  There are all kinds of irrational persons who think that President Obama is a socialist, a Muslim extremist, or not even American; however, there is no evidence for any of these claims.  I see the President as a dedicated and smart individual to the betterment of all Americans, especially those who struggle the most. 

My hope is that the President will be able unite Americans in a way that hasn’t happened since the horrible terror attacks of 9-11.  I remember how united we were and how politics went by the wayside, and for a short time a horrific tragedy seemed to unite America and the world in a way that has not been seen in so long.  Sadly, that is gone and the political partisanship and disrespect has replaced any sense of unity.  It is sad that we can’t get along and compromise as Americans and realize that there are media entities on both ends of the spectrum that are self interested and manipulating for their own gains.  I hope American citizens will long for truth, compromise and understanding so we can move our country forward and not sink deeper in conspiracy theory and disunity.  

Politics in America

In 12 days from now Americans will find out who our next President will be.  According to recent polls from the USA Today, 25% of 18-25 year olds say that they regularly pay attention to politics and the same percent say that they trust no government officials on any level to make good decisions.  This voting group is by far the most apathetic, but political apathy is still prevalent amongst all voters in America.  Only 60% of eligible voters voted in 2008 when President Obama was elected and in the Congressional elections of 2010 barely 40% of eligible voters chose to use their Constitutionally protected right to vote for their elected officials.  Malta leads world voter turnout with over 94%, but most democracies around the world have over 75% turnout, while America is woefully low on the list it would be all too easy to say that Americans are lazy and self centered, but I think that would be an incomplete analysis.  Studies show that people will vote if they believe that their vote will make a difference, or if they have a strong sense of civic duty or strongly support a particular political party.  Clearly American voters do not meet these voter turnout benchmarks.  It seems clear that voter turnout is ultra low due to the antiquated Electoral College and two party system, the obscene amounts of money in elections and the nature of politics in 21st century America.

The Framers of the Constitution clearly did not trust the average voter.  They established strict limits on who could vote and they did not allow direct elections for either the Senate or the President.  The 17th Amendment changed that when it allowed the residents of a state to directly elect their Senators rather than the State Legislators.  However, there has never been an amendment to eliminate the Electoral College (EC).  There are two major problems with the EC.  First, the citizens of the United States do not directly elect our President and second, people often do not feel that their vote is critical as most states are all but predetermined before election day.  In the upcoming 2012 election everyone knows that President Obama will win Illinois and New York and Governor Romney will win Mississippi and the Dakotas to name a few.  Essentially this leaves the outcome of the election in the hands of a few critical “swing states.”  Voters in Ohio and Florida are most critical, but Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada will also be significant this year.  Voter apathy in America is clearly impacted by an antiquated system of electing a President that most citizens do not even comprehend.  

A recent poll of voters aged 18-35 found that 63% of this age groups policy positions actually would categorize them as Libertarians.  In short they believe the government should be fiscally conservative and socially liberal, or put another way, the government should lower spending but allow homosexuals to marry.  The catch here is that the Libertarian party has less than 285,000 Americans that are registered with them.  Why is this?  It is also mainly because of the winner take all EC that governs our Presidential elections, but also because of the entrenchment of the two political parties in America.  The process of elections has almost gotten silly.  Each political party is an entity that cares first and foremost about getting elected in our system.  In Parliamentary systems parties are forced to compromise with each other in order to establish a government, in the American system no such structure exists to demand compromise, except that is for elections, but what does that matter when voter turnout is so low?  Third parties in the United States have almost no chance of winning elections.  Only one third party official is in the Senate and third party candidates such as Ross Perot or Ralph Nader are only blamed for stealing elections.  It is time that a few third party candidates are allowed to participate in Congressional debates and especially the Presidential debates.  

Over $1 billion is going to be spent on this election.  An individual can run any ad they want supporting a party or candidate and spend unlimited funds to get them elected (indirectly).  It is time to end this inequity in our system.  Access to media should be publicly doled out and distributed to candidates in a way that allows people access to the candidates without hearing how every candidate for public office wants to kill grandma’s kitten.  It is clear that this could be interpreted as a restriction of speech, but what our current system allows is that persons with huge amounts of wealth have more influence via media than those without wealth.  A publicly financed campaign is the only solution albeit imperfect to the ridiculous ads that surround our campaigns today.  

Finally, a non-systematic factor has taken the disrespect and dishonesty in politics to a new level.  This factor is the 24/7 “cable news networks.”  This started with CNN being launched in 1980, but did not begin to take off until the Persian Gulf War and CNN’s coverage of the invasion and takeover of Iraq.  Shortly thereafter competitors arose such as Fox News and MSNBC.  These news networks are owned by corporations whose monomaniacal goal is to make money.  One can not be engaged in honest to goodness journalism if they have to appeal to a market.  Therefore, our news networks continually have breaking news that is no big deal, coverage of the latest celebrity gossip and programs that are filled with incomplete and dishonest analysis masked as news and journalism.  A democracy can not function without an alert, truly journalistic and independent media.  The sad fact is that our corporate owned news networks are neither journalistic or independent and are rarely alert to the issues they should be.  When Woodward and Bernstein revealed the corruption of the Nixon administration they were true journalists aiming to keep an eye on the government.  But today with so many television stations and websites accessible to everyone in America it is getting difficult to discern legitimate journalism to a trained eye, and most Americans are not “trained eyes.”  

Theoretically the true authority in and democracy lies within the hands of the people.  As the United States is a Republic, we elect people to make decisions for us, but the problem is that we no longer have total control over our elections.  Without direct elections for the President and legitimate challengers to the Republicans and the Democrats our future elections will become more corrupt and less democratic.  Unless private money is taken out of elections and modern 24/7 media find their moral compass the future of America is murky.  The United States is a great country, a unique place in the history of the world, but unless we are vigilant about our electoral system we as citizens may begin to lose the grip we ought to hold on our country.  

Politics 2012

In just a few short weeks Americans all over the world will be mailing in their ballots or heading to polls and it appears this will be a very close election.  With polls in the swing states drawing ever closer it is anyone's guess who will win the all important states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Florida.

The two men running have very different stories and are very different people, but both are extremely compelling.
Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii to a single mother and an absent father.  At the age of 10 his mother too abandoned him and he was raised the rest of his youth by his grandparents.  As a young man of mixed race it always seemed a challenge for him to find an identity.  It seems while he was in college at Columbia he decided that his fate didn't lie where he saw all his other contemporaries heading.  He went to Chicago and took a low paying job as a community organizer there trying to assist impoverished families and schools.  After a few years he headed to Law School at Harvard and became the first African American editor of the Law Review.  He worked extremely well with the conservatives there and this gave him the belief that if well intentioned individuals sat down and intelligently discussed and debated then compromise could be reached on all manner of policies.  After a difficult introduction to politics, he ran for US Senate in 2004 and gave the speech of his lifetime at the Democratic National Convention.  When I saw this speech I was quite convinced that he would be President someday.  He took his seemingly naive belief of compromise with him into the White House with him after being elected the first African American President in a country that was founded upon slavery.  This belief in compromise failed for many reasons, but mostly because politicians aren't interested in passing good public policy, but winning.
Mitt Romney was born into a good hard working Mormon family of privilege and followed in his father's footsteps with having significant business success, then running a state and finally running for President.  Romney was a maverick in his time at Bain Capital and not only created a fortune for his family, but a name for himself in the private equity world.  In 2000 he came on board and saved the Salt Lake City games from scandal and disgrace before he ran for governor and won in Massachusetts mid-decade.  In 2006 he was pro-choice, pro gay rights and passed Romney-care.  This was his banner achievement in politics, passing a health care bill in Massachusetts that mandated all people must buy health insurance.  Two years later he decided to run for the Republican nomination for President, but the aforementioned policies didn't warm him to Republican primary voters in Iowa, New Hampshire or any other state.  Now in 2012, he has overcome that by altering his views on those policies and attempting to convince voters that he is the man to turn the flat economy around.  It remains to be seen if he is given that chance.

My quick assessment:  I think both men are good men, good fathers and good husbands.  Barack Obama seems to have a drive to genuinely change the situation in our country for the better by sticking to policies that he has believed in for quite sometime.  Mitt Romney appears to take a market approach, by trusting the people and the market to determine his policies.

We shall see which direction voters choose in a short time.