Here’s the basic problem with politics: anyone that actually wants to be a politician is exactly the kind of person you do not want in charge … of anything. Simply put, wanting to be a politician should disqualify you from being one.
From both sides of the fence, liberals and conservatives, who would want to go through all the baloney a person has to go through to get themselves elected? Clearly a person would have to be mental … or a narcissist, as evident in 95% of our political offices.
So here’s my solution: we get people for political office the same way we get people for jury duty.
For each office we get a random sample of the electorate, maybe twenty or forty people, send them summons for the office they qualify for, and they have to report for candidacy. It will hark back to the days when holding a public office was considered a civic duty, and not power trip it has become. Yeah, some people would try to get out of it, but there would definitely be some worthy players who never would have gotten the chance otherwise.
The media would love it, “Summons Day” would be like a carnival for them, running all over the voting districts trying to have the first interviews with the people selected to show up for duty. The voters would be able to vote from a complete cross section of society, for better or worse. We’d have debates between opinionated old women and their frat boy opponents. The people in charge would be as diverse as the constituents. And I’m talking about every office, from mayor, to state representatives, senators, even the president – ten randoms from every state, we could find a good candidate out of that pool of 500. Could it really be any worse than what we have now? Every term we would have a fresh new batch of public servants ruling out cronyism. And most importantly, people would be interested in politics, because it might actually effect them personally.
Imagine that one day, heading out to your mailbox, finding the red, white, and blue computer printed summons, opening it up…”Crap, I got governor”.