I don't understand this line of thinking. Do you believe Steve Wozniak would make a better president than Steve Jobs? Leadership often requires a strong dose of charisma and moxie. Those geniuses without people skills make great advisors.
You might want to go back and research presidents before television and the internet. Some of the most effective ones had pretty shitty personalities and habits. Today they'd never make it.
My only argument is that we are probably keeping a lot of really good candidates from participating in the process because the focus is on whether or not you look great and do well in a talk show and give it to the other guy in a debate rather than what really matters.
Here's an imperfect analogy. I've been sailing since, well, forever. I'll go out in almost any weather because I have confidence in my abilities. As long as the boat is in good shape and can handle it, I can. I am also pretty good at sailing when there's almost no wind, when you really have to optimize things to generate propulsion with almost no power available.
I see lots of people at the marina who come out with the latest gear. They look good. No, they look great. Beautiful shirts, and marine coats and boots and brand new lines on the boat, perfect new sails and all the gear sparkles. But they can't sail worth a damn. They motor out of the marina, put up the sails, go around and around a few times and motor back in. All show and no go. Don't even ask them to go sailing at night. They'll piss in their Gucci pants.
These people show well, talk the talk and seem to walk the walk but are worthless as far as sailing is concerned. I know this all too well, I did an island crossing one time with one of these folks and it nearly cost me my life as I was hanging on to the boom while reefing in a storm 'cause the idiot didn't know how to keep the thing into the wind.
My point is that the system we have in place today gives zero room to those with real expertise. Look at Obama as one example: Not one company would have hired him to even run a cookie baking operation in 2008. Yet, he got the country to run. Are we morons or what? And how about little-Bush? Do I even need to get into how moronic it was for someone like that to be on a ticket? And, Sarah Palin? Really? Are we all a bunch of lobotomized robots or is it the system?
My admittedly flawed ideas straight from utopia seek to change things up so that other people, those who can really sail, might have a chance to get the helm. It should not cost a billion dollars to run for president. We should use the Internet to allow lots of people to participate in the contest and let voters engage in a fact-based search that takes a whole year. It's almost like these dating services that don't let you meet in person or see pictures of each other until successful and valuable interaction has taken place over a period of time.
Anyhow, it will never happen. Politicians have too much invested in keeping their sweet rides going. I swear that some of these people would be selling used cars if they didn't have an opening into politics.
Translation:
> It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority.
Nonsense!
The least you should have done is actually reply to my post rather than do a drive-by with your own imaginary conclusions. Here it is:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736105
This --and the statement you refer to and mangle-- has nothing to do with me (or proponents of an alternative approach) getting their way. You almost make it sound like a childish whine to which I take offense.
This is about having fair and intelligent elections. Elections today feel like you are watching five-year-olds blame each other for who broke Mom's flowers. It's idiotic at best.
Candidates should not be allowed to engage in stupidity. Talk about your platform, ideas and approach. Leave the other guys alone. Let me decide based on who you are and what you say you are going to do.
This is also about making it possible for anyone to run for office. I said in another reply that someone like Stephen Hawking has zero chance to run for office today. In this media-driven election system we seem to have looking good, speaking well, being able to crack a joke, sing and dance seems to be a requirement. Do you know how many super-smart people have the personality of a brick? Maybe not that extreme, but I hope you get the point.
And, how about money. If you don't have or can't raise a billion dollars, forget it. Again, tons of incredibly gifted people don't stand a chance. They wouldn't even get off the line. That is wrong.
The electoral college also means that Independent candidates have an almost zero chance of winning the presidential election. Zero. States like California have a significant number of independent voters. I was talking to one the other day and he said something akin to "My vote really doesn't count. In order to feel like it counts I have to choose to vote for either a Republican or Democratic candidate.". How fair is that system.
A popular vote, devoid of state lines and with rules aimed at reducing the bullshit factor would allow the very real possibility of having more than two choices. It should allow almost anyone to run and be heard.
There's no reason why it couldn't start on a website where candidates --hundreds of them, thousands of them-- stated their platform and start being filtered two years in advance of the election. Don't have a computer? Want to participate in the process? Go to a library and use on of the computers there. I find it funny to note that some of these purportedly disenfranchised voters are walking around with iPhones, driving SUV's and watching satellite television on their 50 inch LCD TV's.
I agree with you on the point about mandatory voting. I lived in Argentina for a number of years and watched how mandatory voting is twisted and turned there for candidates' benefits. They'd literally buy votes through all sorts of giveaways. What's worst is that the people being manipulated are the poor and uneducated. The ugly truth is that they just follow the carrot.
The opposite of this is that absolute morons are allowed to vote in either system. Voluntary voting does not guarantee that informed people will vote any more than it guarantees that votes are not being bought. I've had conversations with people who absolutely floored me. One guy was in absolute awe of the government because, as he put it, "they are so smart that they can predict eclipses and shit like that. Anybody that can do that is incredible". Another person, who happens to be the daughter of a friend of mine who has a PhD in Physics didn't understand and couldn't get her head around what the national debt means to her. She obviously didn't follow in her fathers footsteps, at least in the math department.
How do you fix this? I don't know. I know it isn't popular to say that not everyone should vote. If people are required to pass a test to obtain a driver's license, why shouldn't they be required to pass a test every year in order to be able to vote? They can actually kill more people with their vote than by not knowing how to drive a car. Not so? How about the religious morons who vote across hard religious beliefs and against issues of health, science and progress that could save millions of lives? Before anyone goes off for this comment, I am not a Democrat or Republican. I hate aspects of both parties and like aspects of both.
The electoral college is just not good any more. The same is true of the way we allow these campaigns to be run and funded.