In my last post I drew a comparison between our elections process and the Miss America contest. I'm more than a little disgusted by the fact that this was a reasonable comparison to make, and that there isn't a clearer difference between the paths candidates take getting elected to political office and the paths traveled by contestants participating in and winning beauty pageant.
Depressing and demoralizing as it is, it's impossible to overlook the fact that the American public is addicted to a certain type of competition, the kind where a big group of people are thrown together in a totally unrealistic situation and forced to battle it out with their fellow competitors while overcoming ridiculous obstacles until someone emerges victorious. It isn't really even an exclusively American quirk, people everywhere at every point in human history have demonstrated a desire to be entertained by watching other people compete, and the nastier it gets as the competition goes on the more people are enticed to watch. Whether you're a sports fan, a political junkie, or just a fan of beauty pageants we all love seeing the gladiators and lions fight it out in the arena.
Accepting the truth that this is just how people, and voters, are got me thinking about whether it would be possible to turn the campaign trail into a reality show that not only satisfies the public desire for a dramatic winner take all competition, but also forces the candidates to live up to the challenge that running for office ought to be about. That sent me down a rabbit hole where I had to face some of my own stupid guilty pleasures while I recalled all the silly reality tv competitions and series that I've spent time watching over the years. I'll admit that I am a little bit embarrassed about how much I've cared about the goings on of the characters on some of those shows, but I will not divulge just which shows I've been an avid fan of because I would like to preserve my dignity.
Obviously some of the more popular iterations of this genre aren't a good fit for something as sacred as our government no matter how frivolous it has gotten lately. A Real World or Fear Factor type show wouldn't really be the best platform for showcasing the candidates abilities to govern. I did finally hit upon one show that I think could be adapted to accomplish the goal and still provide the riveting entertainment that we crave so badly. Big Brother Elections has potential.
For anyone who managed to miss the show while it was still on the air, the basic concept was that a bunch of random people were isolated in a house together for the duration of the show, had their every move observed by cameras (except in the bathroom) and the footage was aired live in real time on the internet and in compilations of selected scenes each week. They were also given challenges to complete as individuals and teams and viewers got to watch and see how they did. Each week, if I recall, viewers were given the opportunity to vote for their favorite cast member and the contestant with the fewest votes was taken out of the house. Eventually only two were left and viewers voted for a winner between them.
This has some serious potential when you think about it as a means of getting voters excites and giving them and opportunity to learn about the candidates. When you think about it, the way our campaign process works hasn't really been updated since the very first elections were held following the adoption of the Constitution (even before that because the idea of electing government officials wasn't a brand new concept developed by our Founding Fathers, it was just a tried and true concept that they tweaked a bit.) Way back in the day the whole idea of voting for candidates, and even the idea of a representative government at all, we pretty novel for most of the newly established voting public. Time, distance, and lack of technology demanded that candidates running for office get out and hit the trail the way that they do because otherwise most of the voting public would know doodly squat about them and why they deserved to get elected. Someone who wanted a shot at an elected position didn't have many options other than to physically go to the voters and repeat over and over again the list of reasons they should be elected. Low literacy rates and lack of the means to disseminate information on a wide scale meant those repetitions needed to be spoken aloud and in person to every voter willing to listen and possibly be swayed by the candidates words.
As time went by and technology improved candidates have adopted things like tour buses and air travel, mass mailings and robo calls and the internet to widen their reach and get their words to more voters, but they haven't dropped the habits of repeating the same things over and over again to different groups in different places throughout the campaign. They are still traveling around trying to make sure they get shake as many hands and kiss as many babies as humanly possible, like those are really the things that they should be doing to convince people they are the best person for the job. If anything, the words they spout now are even less backed by substance and good ideas than the ones that politicians like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt spouted during their time on the campaign trail. The whole process has devolved into a never ending series of sound bites, memes, and attack ads with most of the candidates time being spent begging for more money so they can add another stop to their tour or shoot another ad that doesn't really say anything.
In this day and age it is damn near impossible in the US to find a person who doesn't have at least some kind of access to mass media in one form or another as well as the ability to read or listen to a summary of a message that is delivered via mass media. There is no legitimate reason for candidates to be out gallivanting across their state or the country visiting voters in person during the campaign process, other than to charm those voters into giving them money. Our Constitution does have a single word in it that even implies that it is the job of citizens to give individual politicians or political candidates money. In fact, I'm pretty sure there is something in there about the right to vote and participate in the process by electing politicians being free. The time for candidates to travel and meet with voters is BEFORE they declare their intention to seek an elected office, while they are making the decision about whether they are really qualified and do represent the views of people other than themselves. Then they should be getting out there and talking to the people they might someday represent, getting to know them and learning about the issues that affect them, giving them the opportunity to influence the potential candidates beliefs and ideas about things they may not know a lot about.
By the time a candidate has declared themselves worthy of seeking votes they should be ready to start earning them by demonstrating that they have a firm grasp of all the issues their future constituents care about and a definitive plan for how they will behave in office if they do get elected. We don't need to meet them and be charmed by them at that point, we need to see them at work and that work should be thinking about and telling us the answers to our questions without the opportunity to shade their answers according to what they think is most likely to win our votes. Government in general and campaigning specifically is plagued with the problem of too much compromise. This isn't baseball where the best outcome is achieved by everyone working together as a team, and if it were then we ought to be electing politicians as teams rather than as individuals. When we cast our vote for a candidate we are telling them that we want them to go to work and do what they said or we believed they would do. Is that always going to mean that they manage to get the job done? No, because there are a whole lot of people who voted for other candidates because they wanted them to go and do the exact opposite of what we wanted our guy to do and sometimes those people's views will be the ones represented successfully over ours. Sometimes there just won't be enough support for anything to get changed at all, but if politicians are really representing the people who voted for them then that is an indicator that the voters weren't ready for anything to change.
Anyways, after those messages, it's time to get back to the show. In my little fantasy, all the candidates who are hoping to be considered get quarantined together for the duration of the campaign season. Right off the bat we get to cut down on the length of the campaign season cause there is no way anyone in their right mind is going to want a Senate seat badly enough to live in near isolation for 16 months or so. We'd be looking at a campaign season that lasts from maybe the week after Labor Day up until the first week of November, which totally fits in with the attention span of your average citizen. They all declare themselves at the same time, and they all move into the "house" (The house can be an island, a deserted army barracks, a ranch, whatever, as long as it's closed off from the rest of the world.) I suppose you could have more than one house for candidates from different parties or representing different stances on the major issues, but it's not necessary. In all honesty it wouldn't be a bad idea to throw ideologically opposed candidates together in close quarters and see what happens. No campaign staff, no advisers, no lobbyists, just the candidates and their stuff. Definitely the live streaming of the video on the internet stays, because there is certainly a portion of the voting public that wants to see whether the candidate is somebody they could picture themselves hanging out with, plus it cuts down on their ability to paste on a fake persona just for the purposes of charming voters. The competitions and challenges could be a series of debates about all the major issues, and there's no reason not to keep the whole vote from home by telephone or tweet thing too. I don't think removing unpopular candidates from the house is really necessary or wise though, I'd favor leaving them in and letting the vote tallies serve as polling data to track which issues and positions on those issues people are most concerned with.
Throughout the campaign and the show I think that the candidates should be allowed access to the internet and sent questions by viewers and voters that they have to answer. All of those communications should be public, and candidates shouldn't have any access to media or data regarding how their answers are being perceived by the public at large beyond what they can see for themselves on their twitter or facebook feeds. Private communication with friends and family should be allowed, but in the same way that those communications are handled when they take place between a military member or prisoner and the outside world, which means subject to review by an authority with restricted information redacted. I'd also like to see all the bills that are currently being voted on by the current holder of the office the candidate is seeking being given to the candidates and letting them vote on it while they're in the house so people can observe them doing the job- reading the bill, researching (on their own) any questions it causes them to ask, and deciding whether they support it or not. Of course those votes won't count unless the candidate also happens to be an incumbent, but it doesn't hurt to make them show us how they'd handle the real thing.
At the end of the show- Election Day- the viewers and all the other voters should go to the polls and the candidates should stay in the house until all the votes are tallied. Big reveal when the winner is announced, bring them all out to where their families are standing by waiting, and ta da! We have a winner! Voters in the polls get a ballot with all the candidates names on it, and cast their vote based upon whatever criteria they desire whether they watched the show or not. Candidates can still identify themselves by party, but I suspect that when you take the candidates away from the party for the length of the campaign season that will be less of an influencing factor. Candidates will start getting elected either on merit or by virtue of sheer luck as voters play eenie meenie mienie moe with candidates they didn't bother to learn anything about (not much difference there.)
That sums it up, now I've got to get busy pitching this idea to all the different elected officials and networks. Wait, scratch that. This shouldn't be a network show at all, it should be aired on PBS!
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