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Elections are often decided by voters who really
want to vote for “none of the above.”
Voters wind up picking what they consider lesser of evils. They may not like any of the candidates running for office,
and they don’t want to waste the most precious privilege of a
democracy. Casting a
protest vote for a third party candidate is a symphony in
frustration—and a waste. Nothing is more important in America—and in
the world—than the choice of the President of the United States.
Nothing is handled so ineptly. Think about the decision to pick a leader of
America for four years being made in an Iowa cornfield.
Iowa is not one of our larger states, not even representative of
a cross section of America. A
lady from the countryside of that state went to work as office manager
for an insurance agency in Florida.
She said she didn’t dare let her parents know she was
“working for a Jew.” It
seems minorities are rare in the Corn Belt. But that state’s caucus and the few early
conventions seal the candidacies for both the Republican and Democratic
parties. Too late for the
rest of the country, or even an overwhelming majority of the people, to
have a voice. Maybe George W. Bush and John Kerry are the best
America has to offer for leadership.
Forget Ralph Nader. He’s
only in it for an ego trip and what few bucks he can make out of it.
Just imagine—Howard Dean was almost the Democrat candidate. Problem is only a few people had a choice in
selecting the candidates. Some of us are old enough to remember when
candidates were chosen at the conventions, not just anointed with the
party banner. Each state
picked delegates to attend and represent them.
Even Puerto Rico had one vote, even though it’s a territory.
If you remember that small voice coming out of the melee saying,
“Puerto Rico casts one vote . . .”—you will be telling your age. The first ballot was always a promotion of the
favorite son. Then they got
down to the nitty gritty business of picking a candidate.
There was drama. There
was excitement. It was fun
and people followed it. Harold Stassen’s voice on the radio caught the
public imagination. Richard
Nixon, the vice presidential candidate, had a deep baritone voice that
instilled confidence—until you saw him on television. We had some pretty good candidates come out of
the convention system. Some
pretty good presidents. Franklin
D. Roosevelt. Dwight
Eisenhower. John F. Kennedy. That’s an old system we need to go back to. There is one old system we need to scrap.
The Electoral College. The concept of having voters select an elector
who would in turn select a president goes back to the birth of our
republic. Communication was
as slow as transportation. It
was presumed the voters in a distant area would know nothing of the
candidate for president. They
would know their neighbor and depended on him to be an elector to select
the chief executive for the United States.
Electors were chosen and they met in convention to pick the
president. George Washington was uncontested as our first
president. It was
considered impolite for a candidate to campaign and ask for the office. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson butted heads to succeed
Washington. Behind the
scenes maneuvering, particularly by Alexander Hamilton, handed it to
Adams. The system got into
trouble for the third presidency when Jefferson and Aaron Burr ran as a
team. Although electors
assumed Jefferson would be president and Burr vice president, they each
got the same number of votes. Congress wrangled with who would serve and
Jefferson’s enemies urged Burr to go for the gold.
He didn’t, and backed down to let Jefferson take office.
Jefferson showed his gratitude by dumping Burr for the second
term. As an aside, someone
quoted Burr after his infamous and fatal duel with Hamilton as saying he
had the wrong man in his sights. The man who steps into the White House should be
selected by a majority of Americans, beginning with a democratic
convention system and ending with a majority of the votes. George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore,
but won on electors. On
another election, it could be reversed. Turn the elephants and donkeys loose in the Iowa
cornfields. Let’s give
politics and elections back to the people—all of the people
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