Inviting Conversation for February 16, 2010
Indiana Senator Evan Bayh stunned the political world recently by announcing he would not seek reelection. Reports indicated that the Senator appeared strong in his bid for reelection. His resignation itself is not what caught my interest. It was Senator Bayh’s comments that surprised me. He said that the American political system is dysfunctional. He claims that the current environment is so divisive that Senators are spending six years campaigning and raising money, and that with these demands it was impossible to focus on passing legislation. It was also noted that 44% of Americans, as noted in a recent poll, want the incumbents to be voted out. His bold recommendation: Bayh argued that the American people needed to deliver a "shock" to Congress by voting incumbents out in mass and replacing them with people interested in reforming the process and governing for the good of the people, rather than deep-pocketed special-interest groups.
Is Senator Bayh correct? Is the current Congress that dysfunctional? In order for Congress to work as it should, do we the voters need to vote out the incumbents and just start anew? Is there a better answer?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts1134
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Wouldn't hurt
ReplyDeleteHe's absolutely correct.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is, we Americans have gotten in the habit of becoming fed up with our government and then electing the party not in power, which has campaigned on a promise of change. When that change never happens, or if it's change for the worse, we replace the incumbent with the candidate from the other major party, which is, naturally, campaigning on a promise of change. And on and on this goes with an enormous amount of money being raised and spent and all the election winners keeping things basically the same. Why shouldn't they? The system works -- it elected them!
Independent or third-party candidates, unless they are celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, have no chance of winning because the typical voter believes that if they vote for the third-party candidate they will be handing the election to the major party candidate whom they perceive as the greater of two evils. So they vote for the lesser of two evils. But as a friend once pointed out, when you vote for the lesser of two evils, you know what you get? Evil.
What if someone mounted an entirely new type of campaign, one carried out quietly, almost secretly, with virtually no fundraising. It would rely entirely on people pledging to vote for a write-in candidate. They would further pledge to get 10 of their friends to do likewise. They would be in charge of making sure their 10 people followed through on election day. Perhaps the group could get together at a restaurant or home and fill out their absentee or early-voting ballots together some weeks before the election. Each of the 10 recruited by their friend would also have to commit to finding 10 of THEIR friends and then shepherding their votes in similar fashion. And so on and so forth this would continue as the numbers grew exponentially. No advertising, no polling, no fundraising. It would the November Surprise to beat all election upsets.
It would also be a test of social networking (a password-protected website could track the growth of commitments, the "powers of 10") and of commitment to institutional change. That includes a commitment to a constitutional amendment limiting campaign spending (as exists in other democracies).
Remember, no matter how much money a party or other cause spends on ads, we still control our own vote. We can cast it shrewdly in conjunction with others to put conscientious independent people committed to genuine change in office. Or we can continue to throw it at the lesser of two evils.
Or, we can just not vote at all, which is the practice of most people.
Anyone interested in this idea can contact me at -- ecohen at alumni dot usc dot edu -- type it out like a normal email address. I'm typing it differently here to avoid web-crawling programs that harvest email addresses they find on Web pages and sell them to spammers.
Thanks for sparking the conversation through LinkedIn, Wade.
Ed Cohen