Doing the right thing

Sometimes it's obvious when something is right or wrong. Our political campaigns are littered with tomfoolery, shenanigans, hypocrisy, and negativity not worthy of our great nation. One of the things I find somewhat ridiculous and offensive to the American public is the lies that the rich make to the rest of us to get elected. Our system is stacked with heavily invested people buying access and power in our government. It has become the price of progress. Our freedoms are sold to the highest bidder. It appears that there are only two choices - you either belong to a party or you have no influence, so each party can claim to its members that the other one is the bad one - look, one is liberal, one is conservative. Those words are used to the point of meaningless. The truth is far more nuanced and complicated. We get something like Hotelling's Law - these houses actually have broad bases across the 50 states willing to band together along the messages that the party media directors decide to attract the voters in the respective media markets. The messages are carefully polled and tested. A presidential campaign costs upwards of a billion dollars. But you're not voting for a person. You're voting for a ticket. Not even that. You're voting for a circus. I want to end the process of buying elections. I'd like for campaigns to not have more than, say, $50,000 of budget. Ideally, not any budget. I'd like for campaigns to be about ideas about how you would steward the country and how one would listen to advisers and navigate the divide rather than about hard and fast positions on complicated subjects that have far more nuances and deserve careful thought.

But we won't get a candidate like that. Maybe. I'm not really the conventional candidate. I'm more of an internet candidate - I'm never going to raise enough money to fly all over America and shake hands. That's not really what I think being president should be about. Fundraising and selling out is the reason we are in the worst mess we've ever been in. I think being president should be about planning and executing. It's exactly the way software is built. Why can't the government run that way?