The Big Voter Candidate Disconnect

Have you ever heard someone say, “I really don’t want to vote for either candidate. They are both the same?” There is more than a little truth in this perception and it lies at the heart of the problem of why there is such a disconnect between the way Americans would like their office-holders to act and the way they actually do.

That’s because you don’t elect the candidates; the wealthy and powerful do. And this is even true when you vote in primaries. And which candidates do the wealthy and powerful support? You guessed it – the ones that will vote their way. So we end up voting for tweedle-rich and tweedle-richer.

In the last Presidential election, there couldn’t have been a clearer choice between the failed Republican past and the bright Obama future. So after two years in office, what we have is an articulate George Bush (please, dear God, don't let this hold up). Let’s take a look at it: Obama has traded in the war in Iraq for the war in Afghanistan. He was able to get a health care bill passed but it is health-care-light with few benefits for struggling Americans and doing nothing to address spiraling health care costs. And what has he done to stop the rape of America by the so-called “financial institutions that are too big to fail?” Nothing. And in what may be the biggest joke of all, we are all still just as vulnerable to the types of Black Swan events that brought us to our knees in the first place. Wall Street continues to gamble while Main Street suffers. And of course, even sadder still, I will vote for Obama again because he's the best of the worst.

So is there anything we can do to put elections back in the hands of the voters? Well, campaign finance reform that limits individual contributions to that which the average American can give, and preventing contributions from businesses and other organizations altogether would be a step forward. In light of reform attempts in the last decade and the horrible 2010 Supreme Court ruling, this seems unlikely. Term limits have also been bandied about but again with not much support from an apathetic voter nation. As Cicero said 2000 years ago, “Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.”