Sunday, October 21, 2012
Electing Presidents for Wrong Reasons
Washington, DC
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Electing Presidents for Wrong Reasons: What Do These Got To Do With It?
I have been living in this country long enough to get a sense of American way of electing their president. Now after so many years I have come to the conclusion that why we as American citizens often are sending the wrong person to the White house.
The American constitution is a document to be proud of and American system of election supposedly one of the best in the world.
The founding fathers really went through a whole lot to make sure that everything has been covered in such a great detail in order to have a fair and balance system of government.
Often I am wondering if they have envisioned today's election process and I wonder if George Washington and the early elected presidents were elected the same as today's model. Did they have to be super rich or super competent? What really mattered to the citizens who elected them? Is it possible that those citizens were smarter than us or they just simply paid more attention to their destiny or they were lucky enough not to have the greedy mass media?
In my opinion, today, we are voting all for wrong reasons:
We vote for the person with more money because he has more to spend to put his face on the television screen.
We vote for those who are backed with powerful corporations and special interest groups and therefore we are doomed to have an enslaved president and a corrupt government.
We vote for the rich and famous because they excite us.
We vote for those who their dads have been at the office and God forbid if their dad has left some unfinished business.
We vote for the same old rhetoric and status queue because we are afraid of the change, we are in our comfort zone.
We vote for the candidates who hug and kiss babies a lot because we think they are kind and family oriented.
We vote for those who are married and they appear hand in hand with their spouses for every speech and phony smiles, while their mistress is watching TV and admiring her own taste for the tie that he is wearing.
We vote for the candidates who wear their god in their sleeves, thinking that they won't do us wrong because they go to church every Sunday.
We vote for the phony hand shakes and photo ups because we feel important and we must pay back by casing our vote.
We vote for them because they're wearing our favorite team's cap and they are one of us. Oh, big deal!
We vote for them because we have attended a luncheon with the candidate's spouse and may be we had a picture with her too and we are impressed. We cast our vote for her husband.
The list goes on and on and yet none of them really have to do with the real competent individual that we ought to send to the White House.
It truly amazes me of how naïve or uninformed we must be to be impressed by these phony hand shakes and baby hugging to vote for these people.
Electing a president has to be solely on his/ her merits meaning: character, background, education, experience both domestic and international, his willingness to be fair, informed and most of all competent.
As long as we elect our presidents based on their money paying the mass media to put their faces on the television screen, and as long as we are impressed by their showmanship rather than their true qualities, we are not going to have a real competent president.
The current corrupt system of money, power and media frenzy not only is eliminating many eligible candidates, it is doomed to fail time and time over.
Our candidates should not pay to present their platforms to the citizens. They must have free air time on public television and radio to present themselves and their platforms. In return the public media should be funded generously by their administrations to provide the public with good quality programming through the year.
Of course I am too naïve to think this will be happening. I must be kidding robbing so many organizations and special interest people out of. their profits to get the system right.
Unfortunately, this is not limited to electing our presidents rather this fundamental ailment has permeated through the whole American system and until we honestly don't eliminate this virus we are not going to have a true functioning government or the democracy that we are so proud of.
Zoe Rastegar
producer/ talk show host
Accent Productions, Inc.
Washington, DC
202-333-4373
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