Electoral Problems

Everybody complains about how terrible our two candidates for President are – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  A big part of the problem lies with the leadership of the two parties – the Democrats and the Republicans.  Their methods for selecting their candidates are obviously flawed; just look at how they worked for this election.  Another big problem is the news media, particularly cable TV.  The cable networks loved the primary debates, especially the Republican debates, because Donald Trump drew such good ratings.  To some extent, the cable networks’ greed destroyed the American political system. 

The media’s destruction of the electoral system started much earlier.  Their insatiable appetite for salacious information about the candidates has prevented decent people from running for President, and to a lesser extent for any elective office.  No matter how good people are, there is almost always something that they would like to keep private.  Even if they are close to perfect, the media will find fault with them – for how they dress, how they speak, how they raise their children.  All of this without ever getting into the important issues of how they would run the government.  The result is that decent people will not run, because they don’t want to subject themselves to such abuse.  So, we end up with people who have no shame, like Hillary and Donald. 

In addition, there is the huge addition problem of money.  Huge amounts of money have become essential to campaigning.  Even Obama, who is a pretty decent guy, completely abandoned his principles when it came to money.  He declined the government funding for his campaign as a pittance and raised huge amounts of cash that he could bathe in, buy anything, do anything.  He became a Washington whore. 

Interestingly, so far money seems to be a more corrupting influence on Hillary than on Trump, since Trump is running a smaller, less expensive campaign that all the pundits say can’t rival Hillary’s huge ad buys.  But money is a pox on both of their houses.  And the Supreme Court relishes every disgusting minute of it. 

Compare out electoral system to Britain’s.  The UK changed prime ministers in a few weeks, and Teresa May hit the ground running.  It makes American “democracy” look terrible, ineffective, and corrupt. 

Meanwhile the Congress is nonfunctioning.  It can’t do anything useful, and threatens to shut down the government annually.  Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Paul Ryan are failures as leaders.  They have failed their country.  They are incompetent, greedy fools, produced by our dysfunctional electoral system.