Here it is, July 2003, and the next US presidential election is a full 16 months (almost 500 days) away, and we've already seen campaigning ramping up. Of course I understand that a national campaign of this magnitude takes serious foresight and planning and the insane amounts of money needed to run for the office of POTUS can't be raised overnight. So I expect candidates to begin wooing donors and establishing an awareness of their intents, but there is so much time between now and then that its almost pointless to begin contemplating what is actually going to happen. Howard Dean seems to be coming on strong as a Democratic contender (I might vote for him, the only current Democratic hopeful that I'd even consider), but can anyone maintain a credible lead when dealing with fickle American attitudes? Americans in general are so faddish that they'll buy TheNextBestThing™ just because it is new. Getting a lead early on in an election campaign runs the risk of losing novelty and freshness and permitting an upstart to steal your thunder.
Japanese politics are pathetically corrupt and ineffective, a veneer of democracy at best. In no way whatsoever do I endorse Japanese style of governance. That being said, the one good thing that I've seen is that they have a very brief campaign period, on the order of weeks. Prior to this time its illegal to campaign on the street. It's a good thing, this law, because a lot of Japanese campaigning is conducted by speaker cars that drive around and spout off slogans basically pleading for votes. The candidates themselves get on the horn and talk about stuff, sometimes parking a van on a street corner to clamber up on top and scream into a microphone. It's horridly annoying, these speaker cars. Regulations restrict the times when its permissible to do this from 8 (or was it 9?) AM to sometime in the evening. I don't really notice when they stop, but son-of-a-bitch I notice when they start up, especially when they jump the gun by 10 minutes. These cars are LOUD and they drive right by my window. Good thing I don't have a shotgun....
Anyway, the point is that there is a very brief period of intense campaigning. I wish it was like that in the US as well. Personally organized rallies and stuff like that are fine for as long as one wants to put in the effort, but television campaigning should be restricted to 4 or 6 weeks prior to an election. This focuses everyone's attention as well as candidate's efforts. People get tired of the long campaigns, contributing to voter apathy I think. If its focused in a whirl-wind month of activity, people may be more likely to pay attention and get out the vote as a result.
While I'm talking about TV ads, I'd like to mention that I also think that negative advertisements should be taxed too. Candidates can run whatever kind of ads they want, but if they are going to waste valuable airtime talking trash instead of selling themselves (or are they only telling me that they aren't as bad as their competitor?!?), they should have to pay extra for it. That extra then should be funneled into a fund for helping smaller parties pay for airtime to get a plurality of voices involved.
I have lots of other ideas about how to go about strengthening the potential for democracy in the US (one idea: in case of a statistical tie in voting like we saw in Florida last time, why not just defer to the national popular vote?), but I don't want to go into them now. Consider yourself warned though.
Posted by Nutrimentia at July 20, 2003 05:28 PM | TrackBack