Electing vs. Selecting
Deborah Venable
05/10/07
With
the first two “major debates” out of the way now, the race is on for the 2008
presidential election. We are
definitely off to a more grandiose race for the office than previously
witnessed in our history, so it will be interesting to watch it unfold. Everyone seems to be ready and willing to
get his two cents worth in early while closely guarding a final commitment to
an actual endorsement of any candidate.
That’s okay. It’s far too early
to endorse anyway.
There
is this, though:
Without
endorsing a specific candidate, the American people should begin to form a
commitment in their minds to a platform and policy stances. I don’t believe that was done in the 2006
mid-term election cycle, and that explains the current confusion within the
major political parties about what that election actually signified. It probably hasn’t been adequately done in
elections over the last decade or so.
The resounding cry has too often been, “we must vote for change!”
While
voting for change can be a legitimate concern, it can be dangerous if we do not
properly analyze just what change we are seeking. Then there is the problem of the individual candidates failing to
define their party platform or their policy commitments in their feverish
campaigning for individual votes. Add
to that the growing ignorance of the American electorate of their history,
their government, or their responsibilities, and you have a recipe for future
turmoil and possible disaster.
After
the presidential election fiasco of 2000, the term “selected, not elected” was
applied to President Bush and has continued to haunt his entire
presidency. This happened because of
the ignorance I mentioned above and because so many Americans HAD wanted and
voted for change only to encounter an almost equal number clinging vehemently
to the last change they had voted in eight years earlier. It happened because a vast bloc of the
electorate chose to stay home from the polls, shirk their responsibility, and
then proceed to loudly complain about or defend the results from that position
of irresponsibility. It also happened
because we cannot trust our own polling system any more and must continually
cry foul over such silly things as hanging chads, faulty voting machines, and
deliberate voter fraud.
Excusing
all this behavior is quite out of the question, including the whining
accusations of “selected not elected” that President Bush has had to deal
with. Excusing the ignorance of such an
integral part of our process as the Electoral College and the calls for its abolition would be extremely
dangerous, but you can watch for more demands to that effect. Specific voter education would not be
necessary if the education system in this country was doing its job properly,
but we all know that is not happening.
There are NO excuses for the illiteracy and laziness we see in our own
electorate.
We
must not turn a blind eye to legitimate complaints of voter fraud or faulty
voting machines - especially in this
high tech environment of so-called efficiency.
Voting in this country must return to the sacred place of honor it once
enjoyed, and not be spurned as a useless, meaningless activity that most people
can’t be bothered with. The few cannot
continue to carry the many through the trenches of running this self-governing
republic without it getting shot up into a real democracy doomed to fail.
Voting
responsibly necessitates that we all examine our philosophies, our values, and
accurately determine just what we expect from our government, and then vote
accordingly. If there are no ideal
individual candidates on the ballot, we must vote for the candidate that
represents the best outcome. We can all
do that. What we should never do is
cast a vote to punish a particular party for not providing an ideal
candidate. Cutting off your nose to
spite your face is not an option for a responsible electorate.
Believe
it or not, this is a very controversial stance in modern politics. It is also known as voting for the lesser of
the evils. I’ve had people tell me that
they will always refuse to vote for “evil” – lesser or otherwise. What they cannot see is that by refusing to
vote at all, they are SELECTING not ELECTING evil anyway.
As
we begin to gather facts and make our own determinations about the candidates
for the next election, let us also learn all we can about the historic
importance of the Electoral College and keep in mind the effects of the
Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on the Senate process. Let us keep in mind the importance of the
Tenth Amendment and the task of the electorate to protect individual AND
states’ rights. Find out how the
candidates you intend to support feel about these very important issues. Determine the extent of your knowledge about
the vast difference between a democracy and a republic, and then ask yourself
if “change” is what you really want to such things that will continue to exchange
our republic for a democracy.
These
are perhaps the most important issues that will not be highlighted by many if
any of the candidates unless we demand their attention to them. These are the issues that may very well
separate the men from the boys, (sorry Hillary), and the wise from the
foolish.
I
began this website over five years ago for the specific purpose of addressing
an ignorance I saw as the future downfall of America if it was allowed to
continue. The first pages I worked on were
the lookup pages for the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court,
and Chief Executives of all 50 states and the White House. It is a daunting task for a one-person
operation to keep those pages as accurate as they are, but I was committed to
seeing that information be at anyone’s fingertips without having to search on
several sites through more complicated formats.
Enough
of the back patting – I would do it all again to help fill a very real
educational void. I know those pages
get used on a daily basis, and I even get an occasional thank you for their
value.
Your
mission, should you choose to accept it, (a little MI lingo there), is to learn
all you can, share information, and help to increase awareness of the power of
the individual. We have enough time to
make a difference, and we have no excuses for selecting the easy way out by
refusing to responsibly elect what we can live with.