On another one of his podcasts, Leo Laporte dips into politics again, but the conversation turns productive. Someone suggests drafting people for president. Obviously, these are West Coast lefties, so we'd probably get someone just as daft as Obama from them, but the idea got me thinking.
Why couldn't we have a political party that operated that way?
I'm not sure of the parameters; it would be awkward to come out of the convention with a name, and then have our pick say no. If there were enough people within the party, we could do some basic proficiency testing on the whole party membership and pick, say from the top percentile at random.
The draft is great because you'd avoid those egomaniacal enough to run for office in the first place, but we still have to get around the popularity contest problem. Hence the testing. Of course, we'd have to be careful that the testing itself wasn't subverted- perhaps party leadership should be appointed for life and banned from actually becoming a candidate (maybe we should even give bonuses if we can prove the leadership did not know of the person's existence before he or she became a candidate).
Well, it's something to think about as I boycott the vote, which I shall do barring something miraculous happening.
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