When he takes the oath of office, President Obama must deal with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unfavorable opinion of other countries (including our allies), an unfair federal tax policy, a nearly bankrupt US economy, the decrease in the value of employees’ and retiree’s 401Ks and IRAs, the high cost of credit, low industrial productivity, high unemployment, a deteriorating infrastructure, global warming, broken health care and educational systems, as well as religious, racial and sexual bigots who cover their prejudices with politically correct terminology.
And Obama must do everything in the first 100 days of his administration. Or at least, that’s what the Washington magi say. Undoing eight years of Bush-Cheney cupidity, cruelty, and incompetence in 100 days is like reconstructing the World Trade Center in one year. Yet we persist in this destructive fantasy, because, so we are told, FDR created the model that subsequent Presidents had to follow. See Professor Julian Zelizer’s article at www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/27/zelizer/hundred.
However, I believe our hired help have promoted this 100-day limit so that Senators and Representatives can stop legislating and return to the activity that concerns them more than any single issue. Namely, fund raising for their next election campaign. As I am writing this, Google lists about 1,060,600 listings to answer the question, "How much time does a Congressman spend to raise campaign funds?" The answer: Too much!
Time is money, so to see how much money your Senator and Representative took from corporations, lobbyists, and individuals in the top 1% of wealthy Americans, go to http://www.opensecrets.org/.
Not to express it ironically, the corporate underwriters of our democratic process gave generously to the election campaign funds of both Democratic and Republican Party candidates. The underwriters include Chrysler, which donated $585,159; General Motors, $692,765; AIG, $653, 860; Ford, $724,116; Wachovia, $828,006; ExxonMobil, $1,032,334; Bank of America, $2,046,174; Citigroup, $3,016,303—a total of $9,578,717.
These contributions tell our elected representatives that American corporations and their executives are above the market system. Their profits must not be taxed, and their losses must be reimbursed by our tax money. Billions of dollars of our tax money.
That message will be used in the next presidential, senatorial, and congressional elections, if our laws are not rewritten. However, that is impossible. The Supreme Court ruled that campaign contributions are free speech protected by the First Amendment. So it will take a Constitutional Amendment to keep lobbyists and corporations from unduly influencing national elections.
This amendment must contain wording that eliminates, without loopholes, all private and corporate campaign contributions to those seeking elected office in the US government. Candidates will, instead, be limited to accepting campaign funds, to be determined by legislation, from the US government, for both primary and final elections. All radio and television networks and stations, regardless of size must give, free of charge, a specified amount of prime time, also to be determined by legislation, to the candidates.
The primary campaign season must be limited to three months, during which, say, six regional primaries will be held. Primary elections to nominate party candidates for Congressional seats and for President and Vice President will be held on the same day for those states in a single region. For example:
Region 1: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania.
Region 2 : West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina.
Region 3: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota.
Region 4: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas.
Region 5: Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho.
Region 6: Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii.
After the primary elections choose the final candidates, the election season must be limited to eight weeks, during which there will be four debates between the Presidential candidates.* Candidates for the Congress and the Senate will debate according to rules developed by each state.
What about commercial stations’ losing money during this process? These stations are licensed to use the airways, which are the property of the citizens of the United States, and giving broadcast time to candidates every few years will not be an unreasonable burden.
The amendment will not prevent citizens from expressing their political opinions, but it will eliminate the enormous advantage that corporations, PACs, and wealthy individuals have to spend their money to spread their influence over the debate. Bumper stickers will blossom on our cars. Campaign buttons and signs will dot our lapels, lawns and billboards. Op-ed pieces in print and broadcast media will continue; Russ Limbaugh, Frank Rich, David Brooks and Mark Shields will continue their commentary.
The amendment must also eliminate the Electoral College, even though it was advocated in The Federalist Papers, Number 68, by Alexander Hamilton. He believed that a small body of men, elected by their fellow citizens, was in a better position to deliberate over the qualifications and personal attributes of candidates for the Presidency. These electors would be more likely than the general mass of voters to possess the necessary information to make such judgements. And since they would meet in their own state to cast their votes, they would be less likely to be subject to "any sinister bias" or "enter in sinister combinations."
Hamilton lived in a time when information traveled by horseback and stagecoach, so farmers in Georgia and merchants in Massachusetts seldom knew what the other was thinking. This is no longer true. In our time, cable television’s 24-hour news cycle, cell phones and e-mails provide us with an unending flow of what people everywhere, at home and abroad, think and do. Despite this ceaseless flood of information (or as a result of it) we are all biased, and it is easy for all of us to enter in combinations, sinister or otherwise, with people in other nations, as well as other states. Members of the Electoral College in the twenty-first century are biased and part and parcel of the combinations that we call the Republican and Democratic Parties.
More important than Hamilton’s concerns about biases and combinations is the power of the individual vote. The Electoral College creates a favored-voter status to citizens in several states. For example, Wyoming has a population of 515,004, and has 3 electors. Each Wyoming elector represents 171,668 citizens. However, New York has a population of 19,306,183 and 31 electors. Each New York elector represents 662,781 citizens. This inequity can be solved by giving each vote for a Presidential candidate equal value, by electing the President by popular vote.
Also, the vote count from the Electoral College often exaggerates the margin of victory in the popular vote. In the recent election Obama received a popular-vote margin of victory of slightly less than 7%. If the electors were to vote today, they would give Obama a margin of 37%.
I hope that Obama takes the popular vote more seriously than the electoral vote. Seven per cent of the voting population can change their views quickly, and and Obama will need all the suport he can get to solve the problems mentioned in the first paragraph. But he won’t be able to do all those things in 100 days. The American electorate must be patient. And they must demand that their elected representatives give up their fund raising and ideological postures and get to work.
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*My proposal for the format of the Presidential debates is found in my blog October 11, 2008
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