Lamenting the status quo won't get me or anyone anywhere, so I'm going to ponder the positives.
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But seriously, I've been thinking over the past few weeks that if anything, candidates who run for president who already hold a state office have a tremendous opportunity to see what is going on in what is clearly a divided nation, and to see where those divisions seem most narrow. The question that we'll get to answer much later is whether John Kerry, John Edwards, and the other first-tier democrats who stood with them through this campaign are changed in any way, hopefully for the better.
The division itself is as apparent as ever, as we hear and will continue to hear on the [non-Fox] news. I come away from this election cycle with these two thoughts in mind:
- The Electoral College is not useless, but the all-or-nothing concept has to go. The final vote should be representative of the distribution of the people of each state, not a sweep for the plurality candidate. If you have any question about this, ask yourself why Bush and Kerry distributed their visits to the states they did.
- While transportation and communication advances have certainly made our world smaller, our still-young nation is getting vastly larger. We will all be faced with the same problems that plagued the framers of our Constitution... how to represent the diversity of the American Populous in a way that truly works? The red and blue map of the US shows Electoral College wins, but in no way represents population density or even the diversity of viewpoints held within each state (hence my first point).
Over the past day or two I've heard it over and over... don't count on turning out the youth vote. That appears to be a piece of political wisdom we can take to the bank. Next time around? Well, we shall see.
Dan and Silicon Valley to Re-Unite
