As the political debates drag on and we watch with growing unease as candidates beat each other up with charges and smears we’ve heard over and over, I’d like to suggest we shouldn’t be casting votes for individual candidates at all. Instead, the public should be hearing local debates over issues, policies and ideas, and casting their votes for planks in party platforms.

Thus in the primary election, constituents of each party would determine by popular vote what the party platform would look like and what issues and policies would be included. Then, in the general election, citizens would cast their votes for competing party platforms in a contest of ideas.

Thus, whichever party has the most popular platform would win the election, and would then caucus at its national convention to select a qualified person to sit that office and implement the platform selected by the people.

This suggestion allows the people to directly set the platform, policies and agenda of the executive office rather than forcing them to accept the policies and agenda of whichever candidate wins, as we do now. This prevents one individual (the winner) from commandeering the entire platform of a political party — a platform that rightly belongs to all citizens. Remember, we have to live with the platform, not with the personal flaws of the candidates.

This change prevents the politics of personal destruction from being used to prune away good people in the primary election, which leaves voters a false choice between crooks favored by the establishment. From a design perspective, it is desirable to make such meddling more difficult, and it’s certainly harder to buy off and coerce an entire party caucus to force the selection of a particular candidate than it is to spend relatively little money on attack ads in a primary to destroy and prune away good people in the current system.

Lastly, federal judges and Supreme Court Justices should pick their own replacements from a pool of qualified individuals nominated by presidents and approved by Congress. This pool would reflect a wide political spectrum including the choices of many presidents and multiple sessions of Congress. The final selection from this group would be left to each justice.

This eliminates one of the biggest ideological fights over the presidency, and reduces partisan infighting over congressional consent, as nominees would not be confirmed directly to the court. Thus only their experience, temperament and jurisprudence would be factors to evaluate, and no purpose would be served by attempting to block them on ideological grounds. This improves separation of government powers.

I believe the will of the people expressed at the ballot box should be a binding command upon political leadership. To accomplish this, we must stand firm and hold tight to our demands against the current parade of establishment candidates with their pre-packaged promises and focus-group slogans.

The circus is back in town, and the clowns are running a goat rodeo, but we decide what’s real and what’s an illusion.

Bruce Vandiver
Lula