COMMENTARY: We Have a Crisis of Candidacy and Apathy, Not Parties
By Joseph J. Honick
For the next several months and right into 2012 we will be bombarded
by some of the heaviest and most assaultive political propaganda in
our history.
The stakes have seldom been higher, an economically and psychologically confused American public can hardly be blamed for either its confusion or the difficulty in deciphering its support for any political party…or, frankly, doing anything at all due to diminished confidence altogether.
To some of the omnipresent talking pundits on television, in various newsletters and elsewhere, the public is wandering in a kind of puzzling desert of charges, countercharges with seemingly little enough attention to stopping an endless military conflict. This array of squishy qualifications for their opinions makes it easier for them to do the “on the one hand; on the other hand” square dance.
What it would seem we really have is a crisis of candidate inadequacy, compounded by a public numbed to a confusing disbelief in both political parties and the roster of “wannabes” whose names keep getting tossed out of boring old lists of people who think they can lead our country out of the current malaise…..when most were party to what caused it.
I would do nothing to hamstring the freedom of all parties, candidates and their surrogates attacking our senses from all directions. They are entitled to do that. In other words, they have the right to confuse the hell out of the American public. The public has an obligation to sift through the carefully calculated propaganda tested on sample groups and decipher where the truth lies…or where the lies replace the truth.
Much of the political palaver relies on the hucksters for the two main parties to convince enough voters their candidates are the only path to returning the nation to its deserved and former glory. This is a tough enough challenge even if the parties could parade the best exemplars of public service management and government from whom we poor folks could select.
It would appear from my vantage point the need right now is for more carefully screened and evaluated candidates rather than having to swallow whole the carefully constructed party platforms of either Democrats or Republicans, as their party leaders would have you do.
What then to do? Years ago, I became so fed up with the political campaigns for President of the United States that I advanced the idea we could use an approach that many, many big corporations use to gain a list of potential candidates for the Chief Executive Officer and other significant positions: retain a firm that makes its living searching for qualified candidates from whom a Board of Directors might choose….or perhaps a consortium of such search firms when it came to the Presidency.
Why not? Don’t we often hear the shrill cries of the business world that, if the government were run the same as the business world, we would be much better off? There is certainly no constitutional barrier to taking the candidate slate selection out of the hands of power hungry political leaders and retaining professionals who know where to look and for whom. These firms, governed by very specific rules and limits, could set about searching for good people.
I do of course understand the potential for earsplitting objections from those who live both financially and politically for those exquisitely dramatic productions called “conventions” with all the attendant advance, online and post productioning business. And it may be naïve to pose the question of what’s most important at the end of the campaign : the best person for the office or the political majority for one or the other party.
In my dream headhunter version, these professionals would seek out competent candidates for ultimate presentation to the “selection committee”, you and me, and to get our votes.
Of course, the very idea of it all was greeted with “you gotta be kidding” or worse the first time around. And then, not very long ago, a couple of my news media friends asked about that crazy idea I had once advanced and that got some nice media coverage. Reason for the sudden interest? The level of candidates appears to have diminished so much in public and media minds that something new had to be offered, if for no other reason than to generate greater involvement of the voting public that does not think much of the products now available.
That leads to the final and most important step: getting the voting public off its apathetic duff in sufficient numbers to prove that the idea of democracy really lives, with all the meaning that the root word “demos” implies.
However this approach is taken by anyone, we have been made painfully aware that all the old reliable political vote solicitors are being met with the blahs and the anger of an American public resentful that the caretakers of democracy are seen as corrupt, incompetent or over the hill.
In the end, it will be interesting to see if the political power brokers will have both the courage and sensitivity to develop new and improved ways to gain back public confidence through new and improved means for candidate selection, offering substantive programs in which the “selection committee” can believe once more.
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Joseph J. Honick is a frequent contributor to Huntington News Network and is president of the international consulting firm GMA International Ltd., based in Bainbridge Island, WA.