I've been thinking about Sarah Palin, and what she says about how our system of governance has gone wrong. Her ignorance is hardly unique; I find her less ignorant than George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. In our electoral system, the candidate often rises to prominence not by merit, but simply by being there at the right time. What is exceptional about Palin is just that her rapid rise to the national scene allowed us to see her with her talking-point mask still half-formed, while the national stage of the vice-presidency nomination focused national attention on her in a way we don't look at candidates for lesser office.
Are we better off as a country now that she can spout out the names of the three Supreme Court decisions most hated by conservatives? No, we're not. There's no way that knowing just these three names could have improved her ability to reason, nor can using these three cases as a litmus test for Supreme Court appointees prove useful. But had she simply been able to come up with these three names earlier, we would have been satisfied that she knew enough about the Supreme Court to run the country.
The problem is that this doubt about their true competence applies to every candidate. What about Barak Obama? He can come up with the Democratic position on almost any issue at a moment's notice. But does that mean he's a great thinker who can pick out the correct course for America in difficult times, or does it mean only that he has a talent for memorizing talking points he doesn't understand? We, the electorate, really have little way of knowing. Under the current system, there's no visible difference.
The problem with our electoral procedures and debates is they are designed on the false premise that the United States is a democracy. If the United States were a democracy, what we would want from our candidates is that they tell us all of their positions, and then we would vote for the candidate whose positions most closely resemble our own.
The United States is not a democracy. It's a republic. The candidate we want to vote for is not the one whose positions resemble our own, but the one who can do the best job of running the country in the event of yet unforeseen circumstances. In order to determine this, we need to be able to evaluate the candidates in depth. The current system interposes a mask of performance-art recitations of memorized talking-points between us and the candidates. It doesn't show us how they react to the unexpected.
I propose the following remedy to this situation; we will take the government budget for matching funds for the presidential campaign, and instead of attaching strings to it requiring candidates to limit the funds they accept, we will use it as prize money in a new gameshow: Presidential Survivor.
Any candidate on the ballot in 26 states may enter the gameshow simply by providing one million valid signatures. Prize money may only be spent on campaign advertising, including the usual TV ads describing Barak Obama's plan to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergarteners or John McCain's black love-child.
Each week, we will select a random question about public policy. One seventh will be submitted by each campaign. One seventh will be written by a randomly selected hard science professor about a public policy question involving their discipline. One seventh will be written by a randomly selected economist or law professor or political scientist. For one seventh of the questions, we will randomly select a country and then randomly select a newspaper headlines until we find one which can plausibly involve the US. Two sevenths will be policy questions from a randomly selected citizen.
Both candidates will be locked in a room with a computer for half an hour which they can use to look up things on the internet but not to ask advice from their campaign. After this time, they must take a position on the issue. If the positions are the same, one (alternating turns) will be forced to argue the opposite position. On consecutive weeks, the candidates may not agree twice in a row. If this happens, a new topic is selected until they take differing positions. Each candidate is given two more hours to research the topic, and then they will debate for 45 minutes. The debate winner will be judged by ten randomly-selected citizens, who will have the help of experts in the field, and each vote as a winner will pay campaign cash.
I look forward to seeing each candidate handle long debates on such topics as "Building a better banana: bioengineering a changed Cavendish to purge the Panamanian plague," and "Girls, who would you most like to get jiggy with? Brad Pitt or Clay Aiken?"(Citizen Submitted).
In order to keep the audience from becoming bored and to better show the candidates' leadership skills, each sixth week will be a team physical challenge competition with their staff. This will not be unfair to old folks like McCain because the winner will be again selected by voting.
In order to get a true idea of how the presidential candidates will react to the unknown, it is vital that we implement a system like this. For the good of our country, please send this proposal to your congressmen and demand action.
