What do you mean, he's not president?

[andygates]

Obama's world tour is going great guns: they took him seriously in the Middle East and in Berlin two hundred thousand people turned out pretty much to anoint his feet with oil.  Two hundred thousand for a candidate they can't even elect.  Seems that he's pitching this as the Next Leader Of The Free World Tour and the rest of us out here in the world, we pretty much like that. 

Let's face it after eight years of Captain Catastrophe, Barney the frakking Dinosaur would be an improvement but I'm not seeing simple relief here, I'm seeing desperate relief and a thread of actual, genuine, Kennedy-flavoured optimism.  Crikey.

I wonder how much impact this will have on his electability in the US (you know, where his voters are)? 

Comments

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

200,000 to see a presidential candidate that you can't even vote for....strange.
Makes you wonder what effect having a directly elected head of state would have in the UK or Germany. Or even, dare I say it, Europe.
I'm not sure how to get EU presidential elections to work, but then I'm not sure how the EU will work long term anyway.

Democracy is a funny thing. The model we've pretty much settle on is to elect representatives. But that makes it hard if you like some of the things a party says, but not others. And even then, the party can renege on a manifesto promise (student fees and EU constitution referendum are recent examples that spring to mind). The representatives (in the UK at least) seem too remote and unanswerable to their voters, too often they just toe the party line rather than voting with their consciences.
Some places, like Switzerland, have more referendums and direct say (enough people signing forces a referendum I believe). That would seem to be a better model, though I suspect it would often bring through legislation you may not personally like (return of the death penalty anyone). I can see it might be difficult to force difficult decisions through under that model, but it doesn't appear that many difficult decisions get made at the moment.

[gedhrel.livejournal.com]

Direct democracy sounds ok, but how do you avoid giving more direct control to Murdoch?

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

pass a law saying that no single organisation is allowed to control more than...20%?....of the media. Split it by print and/or TV. Or some such. And 50% has to be controlled by UK citizens.
I'm sure clever people could formulate something like that.

I'd just like to get away from the all or nothing part of voting a party in for 5 years. It just means we have 3 parties all competing for the middle ground, and that I can't even think of two big issues where they differ significantly to use as an example.
How about you are Pro EU and want tax cuts.
Or antiwar and want greater taxation. (note that this may be the current libdem stance, but I lose track of whether they want to raise or lower taxes).

[gedhrel.livejournal.com]

Considering how newscorp manages to avoid paying tax, setting up a few shell companies to bypass restrictions on media monopolies ought to be child's play.

(wrt lib dems: touche; they want to raise taxes - but not say so so blatantly)

[andygates.livejournal.com]

PR.

Everyone knows it.

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

I'm less against PR than I used to be.
But you still get the having to vote for a person or party that only partly aligns with your wishes. You also don't have the direct representation. If you don't like how your personal represenative is doing, you can't vote them out.
It certainly increases the impact of minority parties, whether that be Greens or National Front.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

But the only person that aligns with my interests is me. Every politician is way off about something, so it's always a compromise. Parties and voting blocs are a necessary reality.