This morning during my daily music practice/climate-change vigil, I was working on a song. It’s a pretty song, but it’s kind of “square.” I tried some of the standard ways of ornamenting it, and as I did so, I realized that merely adding a couple of novel rhythmic flourishes or hitherto-unanticipated twiddly bits just made it seem like a relentlessly unhip parent trying to talk teenspeak. It needed much deeper-level reconfiguring if it was going to achieve its full potential for expression and beauty.
It strikes me that our current recipes for electoral selection are in dire need of deep-level transformation. With an enormous pack of potential candidates in the running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 — inarguably the most consequential election in the past century at least — there is an emergent possibility that I haven't yet seen discussed.
To hell with the media circuses, and to hell with the "debates," which are not actual policy discussions but reality TV disguised as politics, a mechanism for generating soundbites of various sorts for good or ill, a vehicle for fostering the disintegrative acid of character deprecation and bad feeling.
Instead, let the candidates talk openly among themselves — in multiple public forums — about critical issues, taking questions and input from voters, minus the scoring and the zingers and the one-minute time limits. Let the Democratic candidates run as a Collective: the Democratic Leadership Team.
Let their message be, not, "I'm better than the others," but "we're better for the country and the world." Let their message be, "Over this election season, the voters will help us decide who is to be in which leadership position," not, "I'm the only one who can beat Trump."
Imagine it: a team of dedicated public servants, each offering their own expertise and wisdom in the service of our beleaguered and exhausted nation — demonstrating a new style of campaigning that embodies how genuinely cooperative and respectful politics can work for the good of us all. Imagine a "poll" that listed all the currently running Democrats, asking you and me to respond — not with who-we-think-should-be-President, but who we think should be (brace yourself for alphabet soup) POTUS, VPOTUS, SOS, SHUD, SOC, AG, SOT, SOI, etc., etc., etc.
There are a lot of really good candidates, and the stakes are very high. We need to spend as little energy as possible attacking one another, and as much energy as possible attacking the real enemy: ignorance, greed, hubris, and the cynically opportunistic mentality that has kept our governance from genuinely serving We The People.
Just a thought. Happy Pi Day, y’all.