Time for Change
Time for a Change? I sure hope so. Politics as usual seems to be falling to the wayside. Or perhaps politics as usual is no longer being bought by the American people.
We hosted an event a few nights ago to support Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Claire McCaskell of Missouri for the Senate seats in their states. Both are smart and pragmatic. I am impressed everytime I hear them speak. They know that it is time for a change.
There were 2 things that stayed with me the other night. One is that each of our elected officials spend about 75% of their time raising money. There is something wrong with that. We elect people to represent our voice in Government and then they have to spend more than half of that time trying to stay in office. We donate money to their seat which is in some respects like going to Las Vegas and sitting down at a poker table. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Change must come on how our officals get elected. Perhaps each official who gets so many signatures to run is given an alloted amount of money from the US Government and that is it. Everyone has equal footing financially (although it would certainly be easier on someone already in office) and would force everyone to be creative in getting the message across. There is clearly something wrong when one candidate runs a negative ad on Friday which doesn’t allow the other candidate to respond until Monday and that changes the polling numbers. In essence, people are not reading between the lines, they are just reacting to ads. I guess that is why the Bush administration has had such success. They just tell the public what they want us to hear regardless of being true or false.
The second thing that made an impact on me is something that Claire McCaskell said. Both her and Sherrod spoke about their responses to being attacked from their opponents. They each said that in the past Democrats have just sat back passively. They have responded back with what they actually believe in and how they would go about supporting that. In essence, giving people answers with information to back it up. You can either support it or not but what they believe in is out there in black and white. What Claire said was that we were all being patriotic by being at the event that night. We have been told by the Republicans that we aren’t patriotic but not supporting their agenda. That is wrong. We live in a Democratic society where being patriotic is getting involved and supporting our beliefs. I really liked when Claire said that. She was spot on. We need to hear more of that from the Democrats.
Fred wrote a really excellent post on the event which is also worth reading.