Clouds — Not Storm Warnings — Enter Forecast for Alaska’s Stevens and Young – New York Times
And while campaign contributions play a role in the controversies dogging Stevens and Young, there is little doubt they will enjoy formidable financial advantages in their re-election bids. Stevens as of March 31 had $663,000 cash on hand in his Senate campaign account, while Young had a whopping $1.9 million in reserve.
It’s time to do something about campaign financing and elections. Seriously.
I have voted for Stevens and Young every chance I’ve had since 1978. Back in the day, you may have even caught me working on their campaigns. I have gone to them for help with federal agencies, and their staffs have always responded promptly and courteously. I appreciate all they have done for Alaska and the country. Particularly I appreciate all of the money they have brought to Alaska as funding for so many projects, services and agencies. I’m not going to criticize them now for doing what I have praised them for in the past. Their longevity in office as provided them with powerful committee assignments and leadership positions that have served Alaska well. I’ll be very disheartened if the accusations, innuendo and controversy surrounding them now, turn into actual criminal charges or worse yet, convictions in the future.
That being said. It’s time for them to go. It’s time not because of anything they have or haven’t done. It’s time because the system is broken and the only way the system gets fixed is by removing the road blocks to radical change. Those road blocks include those that benefit most from the status quo like Senator Ted Stevens and Congressman Don Young.
Make no mistake about it, nothing but radical and sweeping changes at all levels of government will be sufficient to fix what is wrong and return the power to the people.
Whats wrong.
- The current practice of using seniority as the method for making committee and leadership assignments effectively shut out new ideas and new perspectives.
- Incumbents have an unfair advantage over their challengers. There is no way that a challenger can compete with an incumbents ability to raise campaign funds. An office holder has the ability to help now whereas a challenger may only help in the future.
- Campaign contributions from businesses, groups and political parties dwarf those of individuals. Whether they admit it or not, politicians are influenced by those that support their campaigns. Businesses, groups, and political parties don’t donate huge amounts of cash out of any sense of civic duty, they do it because they want something from the politician, namely their support in return.
- Political Parties have usurped power by restricting ballot access making it much more difficult for third party or independent candidates with their new ideas to get elected.
- Campaigns have become so expensive that candidates (particularly challengers) must spend a good amount of time and effort into obtaining contributions from those with the deepest pockets. This eliminates many potential candidates that find this practice distasteful.
- Too often voters are presented with choosing between the lesser of two evils.
The Fixes. Ten points of change.
- If the President of the United States is limited to two consecutive terms, every office holder at any level should have the same term limits.
- Campaign contributions restricted to individuals eligible to vote for the candidate. No cash or in kind contributions from ineligible to vote individuals or any entity including businesses, organizations, political action committees or political parties.
- Remove political party designations from ballots, registrations and voter information pamphlets.
- Make ballot access the same for every candidate for office. Nomination by petition with 1% of the registered voters in the election district the candidate is running for.
- Replace primary elections with instant runoff.
- Prohibit candidates from accepting campaign donations prior to one year of the date of their election.
- Campaign contributions left over from a campaign must be converted to personal income or donated to charity, not held over to the next campaign.
- Add “None Of The Above” as a ballot option.
- Change election cycles so that 25% of every legislative body is up for election each year.
- Bar politicians from working as a lobbyist for two years after they leave office.
There is no chance of these changes being made as long as we keep electing candidates that benefit from the current system. You can bet the political parties and political action committees will fight till their last dying breath anyone that would dare propose such sweeping changes that would eliminate their ability to buy elections and politicians. Any organization that was created to further these ideas by supporting candidates would run afoul of the very idea of returning the power to the individuals, not groups.
So what to do? We act as individuals and ask candidates to check off yes or no on each of the ten points of change. For myself, I’ll simply write in “none of the above” if there isn’t a candidate that supports all ten points of change. Others may choose to decide to vote for whichever candidate supports the most, or perhaps there are some “must have” points for others.
The bottom line is that each of us can be a catalyst for change, but we have to be willing to turn our backs on the existing power structure. That will take real courage of conviction to vote against short term benefits that status quo offers.
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