Next Time

I awakened this morning to find that Barak Obama is still President-Elect. And now, we get to see whether he and his team can handle this Leviathan of which they’ve won ‘control.’ I have my doubts, but not because of any personal inadequacies he may have, which are doubtless as legion as everyone elses’. No, it’s more a belief in human inadequacies. The whale is just too big and too complex, so good enough would be my highest hopes. And we’ll see.

Nevertheless, when I was driving about in beautiful, downtown Point Roberts today, I was impressed to see that the International Market’s main sign, one of those changing digital signs, instead of saying, ‘Pork Chops, $3.89’ and then rolling to ‘’Apple Juice, 1 gal.,$2.99,’ this morning said, ‘YES, WE CAN’ before it went to the pork chops, and then returned to the ‘YES, WE CAN .’ I surely hope we can and if the groceries stores are going to do their part, maybe we actually can, although it still is not quite clear to me what it is that we are looking to do. A lot needs doing, certainly.

I was also reading in Harper’s this morning, by chance, about Ken Silverstein’s conversation with a North Carolina Democratic political operative, Gary Pearce. Silverstein asked him about how issues affect a campaign like the one we’ve just been through. “There ain’t no issues—that’s the great myth of politics. . . Basically it’s about who you trust. Where do you think the country is heading and how do you feel about these two guys.’”

That had a real ring of truth to it. So, here’s one of the things maybe we can do. We can knock off elections like the one we’ve just been through ($2 billion according to NPR’s business program), get rid of position papers (except for the policy wonks who like to read them) and TV ads, and tighten it up to a kind of serial, reality show (much more popular with Americans than politics, anyway) in which the candidates appear on TV over a short period of time in several discreet programs designed for us to figure out if we can trust them. ELECTION 2012: WHO DO YOU TRUST? Presumably, the audience already knows how it thinks the country is doing. On these shows, the candidates will talk to people and they’ll do things. We could vary the format from election to election, but here’s some possibilities:

1. A session in which each helps aMedicare recipient understand the bills that Medicare and secondary insurers have sent to them and explains what they should do next. Specific bills will be available for discussion.
2. A session in which they negotiate differences between two angry people.
3. A session in which each provides counselling to a family in foreclosure.
4. A session in which each discusses with someone like Joe the plumber whether he’s likely ever to become a successful entrepreneur; which is to say, what it would take as compared to where he is now.
5. A session in which they describe their funniest vacation, their best vacation, their worst vacation.
6. A session in which they help us to understand what a specific losing sports team should and could do to improve its hopes of a winning season; maybe the Cubs, since baseball is the American sport.
7. A session in which they explain their tax returns to us (their returns will be available for print-out via the net before the program so we can follow along with the discussion).
8. A session in which each tries to entertain, for fifteen minutes, a small child whom they did not previously know, and then engages in conversation with a (similarly unknown) first-time voter between the ages of 18 and 20 for the rest of the program’s time.
9. A session in which each spends fifteen minutes with Katie Couric, Chris Matthews, Jon Stewart, O’Reilly and O’Hannity, or someone of that sort with the ‘that sort’s’ job to be not to interview but to try to intimidate the candidate.
10. A session in which each describes how he and his wife and his children managed to pay their college tuition. This can be a very short session, of course, for some candidates.

Now, I’m sure there are other, better ideas for these sessions (although I do think ten is a nice number). The trouble with blogging is that you don’t get to sit and think about ideas for a week or two. But the concept is what I’m after here. No way this costs two billion. The TV time is free: the public owns the airwaves; the stations only lease them. Everybody is required to wear the same outfit each time so we can keep their identities straight, so no large clothing expenditures are required. Everyone will be required to get a $400 haircut, however. Even counting the haircut, the candidates can be expected to pay for this out of their pocket change, thus freeing the public of lobbyists. And since issues don’t matter, the public won’t have to be working to figure out things that they find difficult to keep track of. And, very best of all, it will eliminate all need for PUNDITS during the election season. They can go vacation in France and vote absentee, and the rest of us will be pundit-free for ten weeks. Excellent!

Ten weeks at the most the final campaign will take and we will have to hear from them only for ten programs, which would be ten hours at the most. And we would surely be better able to figure out whether we could trust them from this, as compared to what we have just gone through which has largely made me want to trust neither of them. We can be easier on ourselves AND on the candidates. Yes, We Can. And that is change you can believe in, my friends. Or something.