Now, if you're really going to go along with me and make not voting a misdemeanor, you have to give an option to the disaffected. The message has to be clear: We're not trying to make you vote for anybody. We just want you to show up. Every ballot, from the presidency to the sewage district supervisor, would have to include a "none of the above" option. We might tinker with the terminology to make it hipper, and to tap into the incipient anger. "None of the above" could become "Screw you, politicians."
Whatever we call it, the "plague on both your houses" no-vote would have to have some teeth to it. In the event that "none of the above" actually won, the election would have to be restaged within a narrow window of time, and that revote could revive an element that has been almost entirely lost over our American centuries: We could make the politicians afraid of the voters again. Anybody on the ballot when "none of the above" won would be barred from the special second election -- and for the next regular election for the same position.
In short, if your election were to deteriorate like the gubernatorial one here in New York has, you could do something really, really mean about it. Here, what has pretty much been a cakewalk for George Pataki over Carl McCall (with a curious independent named Tom Golisano doing a rather inept Jesse Ventura impression as a sideshow) has devolved into a race featuring literally nothing but mudslinging advertisements. I am not using this term loosely. For weeks, the only ads any of them have placed have accused the other two of lying and defaming, or have engaged in lying and defaming while accusing the others of lying and defaming, or, most recently, accusing the others of lying and defaming while defending themselves from accusations of lying and defaming.
The "none of the above" option could spawn its own Nihilist Party. Upset to the point of wanting to kick in the television every time a Pataki, McCall or Golisano ad came on? Go to the polls and vote "none" -- and give them all, in effect, a time out until they learn how to play nice.
My second modest proposal to send voting and campaign reform to the head of the political agenda is kind of fun, too. Make it an impeachable offense, or a statutory one with an automatic fine of $1,000,000 per conviction, for a sitting president of the United States to campaign for anybody but himself. I don't think there's really a way to keep a first-term incumbent from running for reelection, even though right up through William McKinley's reelection campaign it was considered unseemly for the president to do anything but wave. But, the rest of the time, we can and should keep these guys off the street, and back at their desks doing whatever the hell it was we hired them to do.
I'm concerned here, of course, about the tens of millions that can be raised by a president, and the dozens of candidates who can get elected not on the basis of any personal merit -- not even for having created the best mudslinging commercials -- but by dint of the fact that the president wants them to win. But the real goal here is to address what is obvious to even the most partisan of today's political tacticians. Take as your starting date almost any time since Lincoln was shot and you can trace an overall -- if not consistent -- loss of brainpower among the chief denizens of the White House. This is not likely to right itself. Thus we must take a prophylactic step. It's a full-time job: I want my president presidenting, not serving as the chief attraction in the political equivalent of a P.T. Barnum traveling freak show. Most of the recent ones, and certainly most of the next 10 or 20, would be lucky to be able to preform one of these jobs, let alone both of them.
We have to think big picture here. We have to make election reform as compelling, mindless and sexy for television as an L.A. freeway police chase. And the only way to do that is to reward voting, punish not voting, refuse to overburden increasingly cognitively challenged presidents with campaigning, and make the politicos fear for their livelihoods.
Join me. Our time has come. Or, you can vote "none of the above" and bar me from the next elections -- and pocket $25 for doing so.
About the writer
Salon columnist Keith Olbermann hosts the ABC Radio Network's "Speaking of Sports ... Speaking of Everything."
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