Saving American Elections: A Diagnosis and Prescription for a He ...

dabbling in witchcraft and her opposition to masturbation, as well as a belligerent New York gubernatorial candidate who threatened to “take out” a reporter. Although benefiting from the Tea Party Movement, Republicans are not entirely sure what to do with this insurgency that has unseated a fair number of the party’s incumbent officeholders in primary elections.

Liberals and Democrats, in contrast, appear to be lacking in enthusiasm and unlikely to vote despite a decent record of major policy successes that their party has accomplished in the first year and a half of the Obama administration—the massive stimulus bill that pumped money into a multitude of Democratic-supported programs in addition to saving millions of jobs,² actual health-care reform after more than a half-century of struggle, a budget full of liberal spending priorities, and legislation increasing the regulation of the financial industry, to name just a few.

As in all midterm elections, most of the electorate will not bother to vote in 2010. The consequence of this is that the minority of citizens that shows up at the polls will be able to reverse or stymie the effects of the prior presidential election. Indeed, such conflicting messages between presidential elections and the subsequent midterm elections appear to be the norm regardless of who is president.

In addition to focusing on the oddball personalities of and controversies involving those running, the media are in full final-quarter-of-the-game coverage, obsessed with polls, fundraising, and endless speculation about how the election will ultimately turn out, as well as with the political moves of the opposing sides. Will Obama be able to reignite any passion and save the day for the Democrats? Will the Republican’s “Pledge” erase the perception of the Republicans as the “Party of ‘no’” and help them repeat the electoral success of the “Contract for America”? Meanwhile discussions of the central meaning of the election—the policy implications—are so rare as to be invisible, as are serious analyses of the effectiveness of the policies enacted by Obama and the congressional majority Democrats.

Thanks to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the floodgates for direct corporate and