Last one for tonight....
As a Californian whose vote for President likely won't matter, I am reminded of the 2000 election when in the aftermath I had this idea. It especially hits home when you look at the Red/Blue counties maps from the 2000 election. (I think there were actually some people in CA who were trying to do this for our state...)
Because electoral votes are for the most part based on the overall winner of a given state, there are potentially a lot of disenfranchised voters. My idea is that each congressional district in the US tallies up its votes for President, then submits an electoral vote. That takes care of 435 of the votes. For the remaining 100, each state should have two electoral votes which are based on the total state tally and go to the particular candidate who wins the state.
Personally, I don't think the political establishment would go for it. Can you imagine if they actually had to develop strategy for 535 specific votes? There would be swing districts vice swing states...
Maybe now with the internet, this could be possible.
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4 comments:
I will respond in the most civil way I can without injecting class warfare that the Democrats and Republicans seem so apt to do these days. Americans have not forgotten that the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln. The Republican Party forgot that they were the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and my personal hero...Barry Goldwater. They forgotten that the principles of the party were always liberty, limited government and personal responsibility. With their need to expand government's role into people's lives, be they economic or social, the current slate of Republicans are no better than the Democrats and their "community organizer" for a candidate.
Probably the best thing that any Republican who calls themselves a "conservative" can do is read Goldwater's book "The Conscience of a Conservative." This book had a profound impact on me as a young political science student. The idea that government intervention in one's economic or personal lives should be viewed with extreme caution. Which explains why I am a Libertarian today.
Just remember one thing. Pol Pot and Mao were also charismatic "community organizers" as well. Kind of an extreme example but their so called social and economic experiments did more harm than good.
By the way....I voted for Bob Barr yesterday. And your mom too. I'll go into my Libertarian rant later about this "culture of co-dependency" that both parties have enabled for the last 40 years. You may know it as Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." Which has an oh so nice Maoist ring to it a la "The Great Leap Forward" (as you can tell from me, the sarcasm is oozing real bad here!)
Your former high school wrestling teammate,
Matt
Matt,
Well said, and I appreciate the vote for my Mom, as does she.
The Republican party has moved into a very strange place since Reagan.
I will say that I did like McCain taking a leadership role in attempting to find a solution and suspending his campaign. I did not like the result, but I think there are obvious philosophical differences, and special interests who have been driving this bail out.
Obama says he wants to clean up Washington, McCain says we need change...what we need are the people to take back the government from the special interests.
What we really need is to rid ourselves of this "culture of co-dependency" that we have on our government. Our dependence on government to solve our nation's ills is harder to shake than nicotine or heroin addiction. What we really need is someone who can honestly admit that we have a problem and come up with some real solutions to fix those problems, not these minute band aids that just hide the problem and sound good during an campaign.
The only candidate from either party that had the guts to speak out against the current culture was Ron Paul. Jerry Brown (yes our state's attorney general) did back in his 1992 presidential campaign when he advocated abolishing the Department of Education and establishing a "flat tax." He was smeared by Clinton and his cronies. And the rest was history. Hell, I voted for him against Clinton because of those stances.
Unfortunately, when you threaten to cut the "sacred cow" programs you get smeared beyond belief by both members of the Left and the Right. It has gotten to the point where personal attacks about one's "character" are more important than addressing the real issues that affect all Americans. I could give a rat's ass about William Ayres. Personally, I would love to see that aging hippie Marxist in jail for committing acts of terrorism on the American people but that's beside the point. Conversely, I don't give a shit about how John McCain met his current wife and the circumstances surrounding his divorce. There are bigger issues that we need as a nation need to focus on. Like the Draconian tax code and burdensome government regulations that hinder our free market economy from creating jobs.
In the last 40 plus years, we have all become addicted to this line of thinking that we need government to solve all of our problems. If I know anything about dealing with alcoholism, you don't resolve the problem until you admit that there is one. (Speaking from personal experience of course) And once you admit there is a problem, you don't begin the "recovery" process until you begin to swallow some hard truths about yourself and make a decision to make some fundamental changes in your life. But yet, we are left with these politicians and their spin doctors who conjure up our fears using their coded buzzwords to make their twisted agendas seem palatable to the addicted. Thus, these politicians are enabling us to continue with our addiction to relying on the government for help rather than seek our own solutions.
In short, our society is evolving into a "nanny state" where we cannot think for ourselves and that the government feels that they need to define what foods we can eat, what we can watch on TV, who we can marry, what we can sell in South Central LA, what schools we can enroll our kids into etc. The list can go on and on. Until someone can have the guts to address these problems that both the Democrats and Republicans have perpetuated for the last 40 + years, the people of our nation will continue to be passengers on that never ending carousel to nowhere.
Matt,
Again, I agree with your sentiment. Have you checked out americansolutions.org? I was reading the book, Real Change by Newt Gingrich, and a lot of what you are talking about resonates with what I heard from him. Essentially that we need to take back the government, and start looking at hard solutions to our problems.
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