DENNIS CLAYSON | Posted: Sunday, October 26, 2008 12:00 am
Are you as tired of this political campaign as I am? Do we really need three years to select a president for the next four? Will the next election in 2012 start on Nov. 5, 2008?
We need a new law. Presidential candidates can't start campaigning until April of an election year. The candidates will, of course, find a way around the law, and the media will justify cheating for the candidate they like, but at least they will try to control the other candidate.
Our current election system does ensure that the next president will be physically fit. A candidate must be willing to visit at least three cities every day for over two years, eat almost anything and never admit to any physical defects.
The other consequences of the current election cycle are fairly negative. They guarantee that any candidate who will actually stand for something will be eliminated before the summer conventions.
They insure that if any hopeful can't raise a lot of money, or be very rich, he or she will not have a chance. It requires that the candidates must get the media to cover them and cover up for them.
Our current procedure guarantees that the next president will
not be about change. We will not be electing Ron Paul for example; we will be electing John McCain or Barack Obama.
McCain is a Washington insider who will do about the same as the elitist insider Obama, except perhaps in the selection of judges.
If you don't want to vote for a senator, then you can vote for a senator. If you don't want to vote for a man, you can vote for a man.
If you don't want to vote for a rich man, you can vote for a rich man.
If you don't want to vote for a candidate the conservatives, libertarians and Joe the Plumber despise, you can vote for a candidate the conservatives, libertarians and Joe the Plumber despise.
If you don't want to vote for a candidate who will take the nation to war, you can vote for a candidate who will take the nation to war.
If you don't want to vote for a president who will oversee a corrupt administration, then you can vote for the president who will oversee a corrupt administration.
Other aspects of modern elections are even more disquieting.
The material in the media, the letters-to-the-editor, and other discussion make people waiting to be picked up by the mother-ship look rational. I don't think I have ever seen it this illogical and hysterical.
Government and Wall Street take the economy to the cleaners, and Democrats get a boost in the polls! Sarah Palin is an insult and Obama is the Second Coming! McCain is a conservative and Obama is a moderate.
Good grief folks! What next?
Obama is found to have murdered someone. He claims he did it because he thought the other man was an alien from Saturn. The media makes him out to be a hero for defending the earth. We are then told that it doesn't matter anyway because Obama loves us and will take care of us all.
McCain is found to be a Vietnam Manchurian Candidate programmed to destroy the United States. "I knew it all along," an Obama spokesperson says. "Gives McCain more foreign policy experience," says the Republican Party, then we are told that it doesn't matter anyway because McCain loves us and will take care of us all.
If both men put off their campaign persona and told us the truth about what they believed, then we would once again have a real election.
I suspect that under the surface, Obama is an unreconstructed, American elitist liberal. He believes in socialism, '60s revolutionary promises, central authority, the meanness of American history, and that he is really a very good person who can save the nation from its own worst tendencies.
I suspect that McCain is a moderate conservative, who believes in free markets as long as they are controlled, large government for the benefit of the people, and carrying a real big stick in foreign affairs and that he is really a good man who can save the nation.
If it were not for Congress and an entrenched, massive, self-contained bureaucracy, that would be the actual choice, so can we just get rid of the other 99 percent of this silly campaign?