America was built upon good laws

Our Country was founded on ideals and principles, one of which is that we can not rely on their always being good men governing our country. So, the founding fathers designed our checks and balances system to be a country that was based on good laws. Unfortunately the founding fathers also designed our government to be run by inexperienced politicians; the role of congress was very part-time and not supposed to interfere with the senators' and representatives' real full-time jobs and careers.

Today, the landscape is so different that the Founding Fathers could never have imagined what our government would evolve into and I believe that they would not be looking at it with pride. A recent article in The New Republic describes the character of today's politicians. The article seems to portray our great and virtuous politicians go into this place of depravity and temptation where the interns are described as looking almost like hookers. That could be true and this appears to be a 'which came first, the chicken or the egg' type of situation. That is, were our politicians, virtuous boy scouts that were corrupted by evil lobbyists and hooker-esque interns? Or perhaps, does a career in politics attract people that have, shall we call it - dubious character, to begin with? Or does success and building a career in politics actually select for people with dubious character? For full disclosure, I don't think our career politicians were virtuous boy scouts prior to politics, that's my bias.

Career politicians have changed the dynamic of our government so far from what the guiding principles were, that the system has become overwhelmed and dominated by special interest groups running career politicians, who in turn run America. It comes back to the career politician and campaigning. Campaigning has turned into expensive media campaigns, most of which are attack ads and smear and fear tactics. This expense makes the election process dependent upon special interest group support, which essentially translates into policy that benefits that special interest group, usually at the expense of America's interests.

The bottom line is that campaign reform is needed to remove special interest groups from campaigns and thus having politicians that can act for America's interests. America's interests should be first and foremost for every policy. As a byproduct, policies will benefit special interests. This little nuance is the defining difference between good policy and most of today's policies that are primarily to help a specific special interest group.

However, with the current status of our government, we need to rely upon a good president to push campaign reform to make the election process special interest group money free. One solution is that campaigns could be funded directly by the government. Each candidate would be allotted the same, low amount of resources to strategically manage for their election and that is all. My preference is to supply a low amount of resources because if a candidate cannot effectively manage resources in their campaign then that should work against them in the election. I do not want politicians managing the resources of our country if they can not show a track record of effective resource management. There are several solutions for successful campaign reform and this nationalized funding is just one possibility because we end up paying for all campaigns with tax dollars right now. They are just hidden in legislation or really, not so hidden in legislation. So, it seems that this type of transition may be the easiest for reform to embrace.