Confused voters, confused voting

You are probably sick of their smug faces, their stupid names and their empty promises, but I want to talk about the election. I know you all get a lot of this election stuff these days, but I’ve had something on my mind for a few weeks now: We Americans have no idea what we really need in a president.

But we do know what we want: We want everything for free, and we want our president to do it. 

We are a country that has made liars out of our presidential candidates. We expect them to juggle fatty packages of universal healthcare AND tax cuts in the same campaign speech. We want to end the war in Iraq AND we don’t want the world to hate us (which they probably will if we pull out and things don’t go well).

The fact is, though, this is a lot of talk and I think they know it. What they know, and we don’t, is that without legislative support, few of these grandiose schemes are going to happen.

We expect our candidates to keep all of the millions of promises they make to get elected and get furious when they don’t. But, if they didn’t make all the promises would they have gotten into office in the first place?

We have gotten very good at looking out for ourselves these days. We watch debates, the whole time listening for policy ideas that will make our own life better, not promote the happiness and health of our country and the global community. We think in the short-term about things that will make tomorrow better, but may wreak havoc later.

The 2004 election is a great example. America re-elected George Bush on the assumption that he would save our mortal souls from the grips of terror. We failed to see that he was going to thrust our country deeper into an already failed war and degrade our image as a responsible nation in the eyes of much of the world. We voted for a bully to defend us from other bullies (many of them who aren’t actually bullies, they just don’t benefit from our foreign policy as much as we do).

No matter which of the three major candidates left in this election we choose, we are probably falling into a similar trap. We expect Hillie, Johnie and Obamie to load us up with feel-good programs and policies, but then we don’t provide a Congress that will allow those policy dreams to become a reality. And, we are largely unwilling to pay for their plans in the first place.

America is one of the most lightly taxed nations in the modernized world and still we complain. More than that, we want more programs to look out for our individual interests, but we put up a stink when money is needed to fund these things. If you disagree with that, ask members of most of the school districts in this fine country.

The best people to make local and individual changes are local, state and national legislators. The presidency is an important post, but more than anything Americans are captured by the sexy drama of the campaign than anything else. Americans can’t help it. We love shiny stuff. Local campaigns aren’t as sexy, but they are probably more important than the flashy national one we are glued to at the moment.

Most of the things that we charge our presidential candidates with fixing, they have little control over. We blame them for the amount of money we pay to go to school each semester, the price of a tank of gasoline or the wages at some yard-sprinkler factory in Ohio, but that’s not really what presidents do ... and while I’m at it, the failed economy isn’t really Bush’s (or most any other president’s) fault. That is a lot more complex.

By blaming all of our problems on the current administration we are being intellectually lazy. If we let that laziness transfer into this presidential election we will continue a bad trend of voting out of self-interest and shortsightedness.

If we expect the next president to do all the things that we think Bush has failed at, we are setting that person up for failure and setting ourselves up for a huge disappointment.