{"id":2208,"date":"2010-08-06T07:43:25","date_gmt":"2010-08-06T11:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/?p=2208"},"modified":"2010-08-06T09:55:02","modified_gmt":"2010-08-06T13:55:02","slug":"poll-dancing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/08\/poll-dancing.html","title":{"rendered":"Poll Dancing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Politicians love to tout how they are just doing the will of the American people.\u00a0 This is usually backed up by a poll of some sort showing a majority of their constituents are behind whatever it is they are proposing to do.<\/p>\n

On the surface this seems to be the very essence of democracy.\u00a0 Let the people decide.\u00a0 There’s only one little problem with that… the polls would indicate that people are idiots.\u00a0 Not all of them mind you.\u00a0 I’m sure your bubble’s on the level, but there’s a non-trivial number of folks out there leaning more than a few degrees off of plum.<\/p>\n

Consider that a recent CNN\/Opinion Research Corporation poll<\/a> conducted near to Obama’s birthday showed that only 42% of Americans could say they had no doubts the President was born in this country.\u00a0 Another 29% went out on a limb and said he probably was born in this country, which still leaves nearly 3 in 10 Americans in doubt of a fact that is about as demonstrably true as it could be.<\/p>\n

Obama’s Hawaiian birth is not a matter of opinion.\u00a0 The documentation exists.\u00a0 It’s been vetted.\u00a0 Even the conservative Republican governor of the state vouches for its authenticity.\u00a0 Doubting Obama is a natural born citizen is about as rational as claiming we faked the moon landings.\u00a0 Yet the idea persists and has even grown larger to the point where a majority of us have at least some doubt.<\/p>\n

Now consider, these are the same people being polled on complex and abstruse issues like how to salvage the economy, how to handle Afghanistan, how to reign in health care costs, and how to manage our energy policy.\u00a0 These are same people to whom politicians are listening in order to make decisions about our future.<\/p>\n

This would be like having a friend who insisted smoking improved his health and then seeking his counsel on how to manage your IRA.\u00a0 If he’s delusional about the straightforward stuff, why would you trust his opinion on something complicated and important?<\/p>\n

We live in a representative democracy for a reason.\u00a0 True democracy, where everyone gets to vote on everything, is simply insane.\u00a0 It assumes everyone has an equally valuable opinion.\u00a0 They don’t.\u00a0 I don’t ask my dentist for advice on auto insurance for the same reason I don’t care if my neighbor supports supply-side economics.\u00a0 I want advice from people who know what they are doing.<\/p>\n

The way our form of government is supposed to work is that we elect people to represent our interests.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean they vote just as you would have if you were there.\u00a0 It means they enact policy that is ultimately a net benefit to their constituents.\u00a0 At the end of their term they are graded on the results.\u00a0 Good performance is rewarded with another term, bad performers go home.<\/p>\n

However, our current system of 24-hour news, video archives, and incessant polling has resulted in politics having become an unrelenting popularity contest.\u00a0 The campaign never ends.\u00a0 No one works for long term net gain.\u00a0 Everyone is just trying to survive the next news cycle.\u00a0 Witness the recent defeat of the 9\/11 healthcare bill in the House<\/a>.\u00a0 Democrats allowed the popular bill to die rather than risk having to vote on Republican amendments they expected the GOP to offer simply as fodder to embarrass them during the 2010 elections.<\/p>\n

The perpetual campaign has also enabled the corporate takeover of politicians.\u00a0 They need the money to keep the campaign going, and deep corporate pockets are bigger cash fire hoses than individual $25 donations.<\/p>\n

The solution is not at all clear.\u00a0 Less transparency in government would mean less news and less polling, but would be hard to defend as a step forward and would likely usher in more corruption than it cured.\u00a0 It seems the rational solution has to lie somewhere in the realm of politicians who need not sweat reelection.\u00a0 Politicians free to act in our best long-term interest without fear of repercussion.<\/p>\n

Might this be accomplished with term limits?\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 But that only really frees up the politician once he’s in office on his last term.\u00a0 Further, term limits eliminate the notion of senior politicians with lots of experience.\u00a0 In some cases, that experience could be a good thing.\u00a0 Maybe it’s something more like indefinite terms.\u00a0 Let’s say a Congressman is elected to serve a minimum of two years, but will serve indefinitely until his constituents force him out with a vote of “no confidence”.\u00a0 Then his term ends on the next election day and he can’t run again.<\/p>\n

There are likely better ideas, but the key point being that we need to break out of the popularity contest model.\u00a0 That was annoying enough when it was used in high school for the student council.\u00a0 The stakes are much higher in this case, and politicians need the freedom to act long term rather than be puppets dancing on strings held by people who think the sky is green.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politicians love to tout how they are just doing the will of the American people.\u00a0 This is usually backed up<\/p>\n

Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2208"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2214,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208\/revisions\/2214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}