Writing the week before the election, I don’t know who won. But I do know that we didn’t have our best choices on the ballot.
In fact, part of the problem is the system itself. It stinks.
Before we can finish this election, we have to already start worrying about the next elections on Feb. 24 and April 7, 2009. Depending on where you live, each of those dates can be important and the future of your community is at stake.
If you visit www.RadioChicagoland.com, you will find that I have started a “help the local candidates” Web page, which offers guidance and documents and tips on how to run for local office.
I’ll even have an election law expert, Dennis Brennan, join me every Friday on my weekday morning radio show on WJJG 1530 AM starting this week to take your questions and help you navigate through a county election system that is intentionally difficult to keep regular people from running.
But the presidential and national elections always exhaust us. No wonder fewer people participate in the local elections, even though those elections are far more important, in reality, than the ones we just experienced.
Barack Obama or John McCain? The truth is the presidential election is all wrong. We should change the system.
Why not make the top two candidates in the election for president serve together. Whoever wins becomes the president, and the runner-up becomes vice president?
Seriously, why not? Because the professional political animals who use and abuse us every election, frightening us with their mudslinging advertisements, want it this way because it isn’t about representation. It is about them making money.
The candidate who loses actually makes the best person to takeover in the event of a national tragedy. And you can bet that with all the hatred out there thrown at Barack Obama, anticipating that he won (remember, I’m writing this column last week), will face a real threat of assassination.
John McCain’s national people threw the kitchen sink of hate at Obama. They had to work hard to give the mud faces, exaggerating issues involving Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Professor Rashid Khalidi, convicted felon Tony Rezko and long-forgotten radical William Ayers. All of them are from the Chicago area. It amazed me that while Rezko and Khalidi were issues for Obama, they were not also issues for Mayor Daley.
That’s where race comes in, I guess.
Honestly, the way Don Wade was acting on WLS worried me. I really thought Don was going to go into cardiac arrest on the air. He was so frenzied that Obama might win. (Thankfully, Roma was there to temper him, and Roe Conn is on in the afternoon to keep all of us from slipping into Don’s insanity.)
I almost wanted McCain to win, just to keep Don Wade out of the emergency room. But deep down, the idea of electing the first African American president was too important, even though my first hope was to elect the nation’s first woman president.
Women lost out in this election, not just because another Illinoisan, Hillary Clinton, wasn’t the candidate, but because Sarah Palin was. I really liked Palin when she started her journey, although she quickly became a disappointment.
I feared that if Palin lost, the talented Tina Fey would lose, too. And if Palin won with McCain, Don Wade might tap her to replace Roma as his reasoned sidekick.
Watch your back Roma!
