Great post.

Smiley is on the right track. Interestingly, it is the continued growth of this sort of Government Inc. that made Al Gore unacceptable to me (and no, I didn’t vote for his main opponent either). We do best to elect governors and other outsiders to the White House. But George Bush isn’t really one of those. And I think that deep down, the American voters know this and were undecided between the two. Bush didn’t “stealâ€? anything from Gore. Gore just couldn’t win it. A 51% to 50% split makes both of them losers. But we elect far more than a team of two when we choose an executive team.

When we elect a president, we also elect their cronies—as you put it. And it is cronyism that our constitution is designed to balance. But we have allowed the two dominant political parties to define elections as a choice between the two of them and their respective platforms when the truth is much more complicated. There are many careers and fortunes riding on the outcome of a presidential election. Isn’t it interesting how many House speakers and whips have been in trouble these past few decades? Corruption and cronyism run deep in Washington but we ignore it while glibly rooting for our favorite party as if they were merely football teams struggling to carry a pigskin across some chalk line in the turf. And the professional press, the supposed watchdogs of democracy, are at once pawns and accomplices. The boneheads.

Am glad to see a journalist look past the same-old-same-old to see a bit of the truth. But nothing will improve until we voters turn out incumbents, willingly taking the hit on congressional pork, election after historical election until the bonds of cronyism are broken. I though we were going to get there in the mid 90s. But the only thing that changed was the predominant color on the electoral map.

bill