Dancing through the Election Muddle

By on October 29, 2012

It has been over  a month since the Post has posted. It is a sore subject. There are several reasons for this, none of them particularly wonderful.

First and foremost has been a bad case of election fatigue. We just got very tired of endless news about an election that had gone on way too long and squandered far too much money. And not surprisingly, we also got tired writing about it. Everything there was to say got said over and over again. The media is saturated with twaddle about American Exceptionalism and who let who down in  Benghazi. Every twitch, every burp has been analyzed to death and thrown against the wall to see if anything sticks. We are tired of talking heads who know better complaining that neither candidate is campaigning on the tough choices it is going to have to present to the American people to reverse the current mess.

There has been some rumbling about election reform, but only now that there seems to be real prospects of an Electoral College tie, or worse a disparity between the winner of the popular and electoral vote. The Post wrote about this some time back, but it got lost in the twaddle. This prospect has been staring the country in the face for some time, but it was slow getting to most brains.

Also at fault has been the American electorate that has paid far too much attention to amateur and professional sports, which have no lasting consequences, and treated the election like American Idol or the World Series, tuning in for the finals and then acting like the winner gets to make a recording or appear in Las Vegas or parade down Main Street heading for record book  obscurity.

The National Popular Vote movement is an honorable thing, but it is only a way around the Constitution which seriously needs amending, just as it did in the days when it gave women the vote. There is no excuse for an Electoral College in 2012 and we as a country should be able to deal with that.

We have serious national problems and a government that no longer seems able to address them. Republicans are blaming the President, but after four years of obstructionistic and obnoxious behavior they are as much to blame as anyone. Bad behavior should not be rewarded.

The Post believes that, 225 years after the adoption of the current Constitution, it is incumbent on the next president to assemble a new Constitutional Congress, consisting of the best minds in the US on governmental structure, and seriously take apart the current document suggesting amendments and revisions. The Founding Fathers did a commendable job for their time, but there are so many things that did not exist in the late 18th century that are central to American life today that they could not anticipate all we need. They are not the ones who deserve anger if eighteenth century precepts don’t meet the needs of twenty-first century realities.

We have no delusions of what would happen to this convention’s recommendations. After the abandonment of Simpson-Bowles, partisan gridlock and ‘gottcha’ politics  are inevitable. However these recommendations would always be there and could be adopted in time of crisis, or sudden sanity  when real collaboration and bipartisan effort seem the only way left. At some time, even our fickle electorate will awake to the fact that their favorite bums need to be thrown out of office  if they cannot govern competently. Governing the country  is not Dancing with the Stars. It is Reality without the show.

More to follow.

The Editors

 

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