It has become clear during this election that the populace has started to consider two notions that I have not been exposed to before.
- I am sure this has been prevalent for many years but the concept of having a two party system is pissing people off. This comes from the fact that both options do not exactly get you to jump out of your chair and wave a hockey mom sign.
- This idea that “I will vote for Obama just to make sure McCain does not get in even though I dont really like McCain either.” (This example works in both directions of course.) Another extension of the two party system because people are beginning to realize that their party does not do everything for them but due to the lack of options, they stick to its side. What better way to do this than to vote against the perceived opposition.
Humans throughout time have had difficulty keeping track of anything more than some form of dualism. Good or bad. Light or dark. Rich or poor. Liberal or conservative. etc. In all of these examples there are of course grey areas but these tend to be overlooked by the qualitative extremes. Our political system does just this but instead of having starkly polar politcal opposites to choose from, we have decided to set our political compass in the grey and have chosen two poles that are very similar. The grey areas become the extremes (which should be the poles) and the grey areas occupy only a small percentage of the populace mostly due to the idea that you will be ostracized to leave the afety of the heterogenous political middle.
Two parties have an incredible sum of money at their disposal to promote their party. Any other party that wishes to compete on the equivalent political stage will require an election that proves they can aquire 5% of the vote and then they can receive more funding. This we know would still be only a small step to matching the financial contributions being given to the two major parties. So due to the media financing one of the two major parties only and giving no time/money to any other options that would represent more of a correction to the political system due to its distance from the political middle.
Without even the possibility of a large standard deviation, what we have today will be able to last for a very long time. Any correction in either direction will only make small insignificant changes to the average.
I suggest we reform our political election process to promote equality to all possible political ideas so that they public can make a totally informed decision as to how they want to live their lives as opposed to giving them only two choices, sometimes only one.
Install a campaign funding cap for all parties. If a party raises more than X dollars then the overflow will be evenly distributed to the other qualifying parties that have demonstrated themselves to the nation in the past. This will force parties to focus on political ideas and not spin tactics since their money can only go so far. This will also encourage the reduction of corporate sponsorships of our candidates. Candidates will be forced to develop political answers and not spin tactics to make sure that there message will be heard across the nation. The overflow idea will also grow a change in the American population. Instead of raising money to vote for candidate John, money will be raised to be able to hear new options come from the population, and other candidates. Excess money will be used to indicate to the nation that what you are hearing at the time is not enough and we want more options.
This article explains how McCain pushed for a campaign contribution limit. This was done to make sure that the government could monitor more of the money going into campaigns which is funny since this means that McCain is advocating a bigger government.
And so it goes.