Lame Campaigns
How US Presidential Campaigns Are Wasting Time and How to Fix It
I take exception to modern expectations of presidents, whereby each is supposed to proffer all these detailed “plans” regarding how to rescue and or rebuild the country. It’s not the job of a president to be the font of all policy. They have other responsibilities. Hear me out.
My reasoning:
(1) we have huge armies of experts off camera, think tanks, universities and those institutions are where the blueprints actually get drawn up, and then taken to Congress by lobbyists, where favored blueprints get turned into laws (yes, a tedious and broken process people no longer pay much attention to, but that’s what’s in the constitution).
(2) we know that presidential candidates are full time fundraisers and their chief work is to reward those to whom favors are owed. The prez has a front row seat on all the quid pro quo horse trading that’s going on, to secure that seat, so has her or his work cut out for him or her.
(3) The title also says it all: the job of a president is to preside, watch over, investigate even, and then report back to we the people from a place of privileged access. Prying out secret “X-Files” is actually part of the job description in my book.
(4) individual mortal humans have finite bandwidth and capacities. Any big picture economic plans need to come with the imprimatur of the institutions behind them. President Garfield was intellectually endowed and likely would have made more original contributions had he not been offed by that sniveling coward, but presidents of his mental caliber should not be counted upon.
(5) Making big plans all bottleneck through a president, while at the same time training the pubic to see candidates as rhetoriticians, not fact focused classroom teachers, means their speech is all about not being accountable, plus no institutions need to risk their reputations. Everybody “plays it safe” ready to disavow the figurehead, if when it becomes the next scapegoat. It’s all about saying what the public wants to hear, then forgetting all about it, because presidents are not in a position to push their petty pitiful plans in the first place (and it’s not in the constitution that they should).
(6) making the presidents have “plans” for the country is part of the ongoing infantalization of the American people, teaching them to bleat like sheep and never dig into details, because they’re content with the blatantly superficial showmanship and obviously phony campaign rhetoric. We’re supposed to not believe in divine right of kings, yet cling to the idea of divine superpowers, as if solo individuals, running for president, have powers far beyond those of mere mortals, thanks to the mystical powers of this “high office” that Americans love to imbue with monarchic religious overtones. A president is like some king or queen in the mind of the naive and unsophisticated masses in this picture, as if the revolution had never happened.
The current configuration is a recipe for keeping America about as far from great as it gets.
What presidential candidates should be doing instead is spending way more time, starting a lot earlier, introducing who their teams would be, even if only sketching wants and needs. We want a Native American to head the Department of Interior for example, run on that.
I want to vote on the basis of who will be in the cabinet, who will head the agencies and departments. Don’t keep that secret and ask for my vote.
The status quo is to not talk much about that stuff and leave it to the winner to rush-fill a gazillion jobs after the vote has taken place. This is ass backwards. Let us focus on, and talk about the teams before we decide who the winner is.
As a Princeton alum, let me call on my alma mater to come forward with energy policy proposals, many other types of proposals, or at least point to the think tanks its researchers think we should listen to. More like Stanford does. At least Stanford and MIT aren’t shy about being bastions of right wing jingoism. Let’s scrutinize the RAND corporation more. Think tanks are where it all happens. They’re also the ones spin doctoring the so-called news shows (“infotainment”).
Stop filling our media with useless blather about spurious “plans” while postponing all the tough decisions until after the election, when accountability drops back down to quasi-zero.
