I was reading the Union-Tribune the other day and stumbled on a column by Ruben Navarette, who envisions a ‘cafeteria style’ system, wherein voters pick and chose from amongst various parties and candidates based on each voters preference. In theory, that’s a wonderful system. I dream columnists and professors love to discuss at length. And I have no doubt that among some small subgroups of the population this is and has nearly always been the case. But it simply isn’t the case today and unless we undergo a cultural revolution, isn’t going to be the case for the lion’s share of the population tomorrow. While some Americans may follow politics day to day at every level in their jurisdiction, most voters follow politics as a ‘background’ to their day to day lives. Political parties offer the invaluable service of offering the majority of the voting population a shortcut of figuring what candidate best represents their basic political philosophy. After all, particularly with the long ballot, how many people are really going to research six dozen or more candidates and measures? Not many Ruben, not many…
January 27th, 2007 at 12:00 am
To a point. However, most voters look for guides beyond simple party registration (which is why contrary to popular belief, very few ballots are cast completely for straight party tickets). Instead they here from organizations they belong to, local newspapers, etc. etc. What our founding fathers envisioned was a system where each of us would find people at the local level that we trusted and who represented our basic viewpoint to take on the responsibility of going up to the next level and choosing the people for those positions. That is why originally our state legislature picked United States Senators and the Electoral College picked our President. The founders never thought average voters could really know enough to actually judge candidates for national offices, but did think they could choose representatives to accurately reflect their viewpoints.