By
Dan Cassino
So, thanks to a bunch of people in Florida, we have come to the conclusion that our electoral system is broken. Not broken like that i-Mac you threw out of the window, but broken like any given i-Mac; that is, still sputtering along, but not nearly as effectively as you would like.
Of course, if what we have is broken, we have to look for alternatives. Contrary to what most of us believe, there are other countries in the world with other ways of choosing their leaders, and maybe we can find one that works for us.
We derived our system from the British parliamentary system. In that, they basically vote for congress, and the leader of the majority party or coalition gets to be Prime Minister. In our case, that would give us President Dennis Hastert. His predecessor would have been President Newt Gingrich. We can probably discount that method. Of course, the British don't seem to have done much better. Their weird system has somehow elected as Prime Minister the only man in Britain named "Tony." Of course, it's entirely possible that there really isn't anyone in Britain named "Tony," and this is all some big joke perpetrated by the BBC on us stupid Americans.
Northern European countries have basically the same system, except that their political processes are populated by dozens of stupid little parties, instead of two big stupid ones. Of course, someone still has to form a coalition that contains the majority of the government, so it generally takes four of five months to actually get an executive branch together after an election. Sadly, we can't snigger at that any more. The upside is that the government doesn't really get anything done for those months, and when they try, there's generally a vote of no confidence, and they hold new elections. A system that perpetrated continual electoral cycles is probably well beyond the endurance of most Americans.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, those former rat-bastard commies in Russia have developed a plutocracy, where the people who have the money are the only ones who are able to run for office, by buying patronage and media. Were we to adopt such a system, we might wind up with two candidates, both incredibly wealthy off of family ties and big oil, neither giving a damn about the common man. Wouldn't that be a change?
If we don't like any of these systems, we quickly start to run out of options. We could have a Mbutu Csese-seko sort of regime, ruling the people through the iron fist of the army. Unfortunately, we don't have anyone with a name nearly as cool as the former dictator of Zaire, unless we consider "Arizona Illustrated" host Bill Buckmaster for public office. If we didn't want quite so big a change, we could always go with the French system, which guarantees that women are equally represented in parliament. Unfortunately, it's certain that some law is on the books somewhere prohibiting any system that would make Susan Okin overly happy.
In the end, we'll probably wind up right where we started: with no one really caring about the electoral system one way or the other, and that's too bad. Because Dennis Hastert would make one hell of a president. Especially if we could call him "Mbutu."
