A Boston Tea Party ...(A Slogan)

Barack Obama wants change. John McCain says not all change is good change. Hillary Clinton says change only works if you can really produce change. Change, change, change…change…change, change…change, change, change. I have a one-word answer for anyone expecting change and that word is SHEEP.

The next President of the United States is guaranteed to be a senator. I believe the Senate is the last place we should look to find a new executive. The Senate is an exclusive country club made up of career politicians. While governors work on creative ways to advance their respective states, the Senate is where major legislation goes to die. Senators are full of pomp and circumstance and prestige. They use words like “my esteemed colleague from” or “the honorable Senator from”. On a tour of the capital a couple of years ago I noticed people were not allowed in the Senate chambers while they could sit in the House chambers. Most Senators end up as lifers with incumbency reelection rates at well over eighty-five percent. Career politicians prefer the status quo.

Incumbency rates continue to climb through the use of gerrymandering and the ever-increasing financial advantage of the incumbent. We have also allowed our federally elected officials to create two types of people, those who get some sort of financial aid from the federal government and those who do not, for your information I fall into the latter category. Many however do not. Our politicians favor increasing the number of those who do receive financial aid because it helps with the path to reelection. If a voter has on a ballot an incumbent whom the voter disagrees with on the issues one hundred percent but that incumbent provides strong financial support to the voter in the form of pork, subsidy, or some other redistribution, it is the incumbent who will more than likely get the vote. Politicians know money trumps all other social or fiscal issues.

It is the unwillingness of the American people to elect new politicians and the preference of our politicians to spend an entire lifetime in office that make any chance of “change” a pipe dream. A single President cannot change the culture of Washington. Instead, change must come from the American people being less like sheep and more like a Sheppard. Imagine if only fifteen percent of all incumbents won reelection, would not change then be much more possible? Politicians have a favorable rating of less than thirty percent on average yet have no major problem in getting placed back in office. Evidently, it is always the other politicians who are terrible but not your own. My hunch is some financial “attachment” is involved that makes your guy worthy while some other politician is scum.

Every time I hear some politician say how all he/she wants to do is serve, I want to throw up. It is the lust for power and financial gain that keeps these people in office. They work every waking moment in order to remain in office. How many of these people would pay to serve rather than the other way around? I think a truly genuine and sincere form of serving one’s constituents is to limit one’s time in office so that another citizen may also serve. Would that not be a much more honorable form of public service? Would we not have more respect for our politicians? Would it not result in actual “change”? Would it result in the same financial benefits to constituents? Until Americans realize there are hundreds of thousands of people who can serve equally as well as any incumbent the word “change” will remain just a slogan. A slogan sheep follow blindly.