VP choices and more

I never planned for this to be a political blog, especially as I've become pretty bad about paying attention to politics.  And yet, here we are with our third legitimate post, and once again, it's about politics.  In my defense, I'm trying to avoid partisan hackery.

John McCain has just nominated Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his VP candidate.  Like most Americans, I'm sure, I had never heard of her before reading her name on CNN (and even after reading 3 or 4 articles about the choice, I still had to flip back a second ago to check on her first name).  The Democrats are already killing her for a lack of experience and qualification, playing up the fact that she's "a heartbeat away from the Presidency," which is particularly important (they say) because McCain is 72 and has had multiple bouts with cancer.*

* You know, McCain's health was not something I was terribly worried about, and it still doesn't bother me that much, but I just glanced through the stats, and he would be the oldest president at his inauguration by three years.  That's more significant than I'd thought.**

**Oh, I'm picking these "Pozterisks" up from Joe Posnanski, who coined the term for the random but very entertaining tangents in his superb sports blog.  Also a tip of the hat to Terry Pratchett, who has pretty much done the same thing with great comic effect in his Discworld novels for the last 20 or 30 years.

Anyway, I have to say that I don't like this argument; for me, experience is vastly overrated.  To my mind, Palin's lack of it does not make her a worse VP candidate, nor does Obama's lack of it make him a worse Presidential candidate.  I want a President who is intelligent (obviously), can think for him/herself, but also can listen and learn from those around him and is willing to bring diverse viewpoints into that conversation.  If you surround an intelligent, open-minded person with knowledgeable and diverse advisors, I would trust that person to make a good decision, regardless of his or her experience.

This brings me to one of the biggest problems I have with our political system - the primary system.*  All of the viable candidates tend to sell out to please the more radical base of the party, as it turns out in the greatest numbers, and the base generally wants to be rewarded for its support with like-minded advisors, cabinet members, and judges; more significantly, appointments of people with opposing opinions is viewed as a betrayal.  As a result, we tend not to get the well-rounded advisor group presenting many points of view, but instead nuances on one point of view.

* This is problem #2; problem #1 is that most people are, for lack of a better word, stupid.  We'll get back to that problem in a later post, though.

Given my druthers, I would do away with the primaries, which tend to turn into a mockery of democracy,* what with different states having different levels of influence based on the timing of the primary and having different procedures for voting and awarding delegates, not to mention the whole superdelegate issue.  I see a couple of possible replacement systems (granted, these are pretty radical and won't ever happen, but it's fun to theorize).  In both cases, all interested candidates would be free to run (as part of their party) in the general election; that would mean potentially Hillary, John Edwards, Romney, and Huckabee could still be on the ballot this year (and perhaps others).  Option one would give every voter a set number of votes (say, 3, for the purposes of this example) which could be used for any number of voters.  A big Hillary fan could cast 3 votes for Hillary, while someone who liked both Hillary and Obama might vote twice for Obama and once for Hillary.  Option two would allow a voter to check off every name that he or she approved of from the presidential candidate list.  Perhaps we'll go into the pros and cons of such systems later, but it's late and I'm tired, so that will have to do for now.

* Now, I won't say that democracy is necessarily a good thing (again, more coming later), and so I'm not criticizing the primaries solely for being a mockery of democracy.  I criticize them because, for the reasons discussed earlier, I think they often can fail to choose the best candidate, and even when they do, they unduly influence the positions that candidate takes.  In the end, they are both an ineffective method of choosing candidates and are not particularly democratically fair - that qualifies as a failure all around in my book.