Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote that a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy. How well informed and educated were people who voted for Donald Trump? After having seen what little good Trump has been able to do, except for himself and immediate family, and how much damage he has already done, many have come to regret how they cast there vote.
Jefferson also said that democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%, – in contrast to the last election, where Donald Trump only got 46.1%, or about 3million votes less than his opponent, Hillary Clinton, still taking away the rights of the remaining majority.
It will probably remain a mystery why so many could vote for a sexual assaulter, an habitual liar, childish name caller and several times bankrupt, who didn’t seem to know much about the US Constitution, government’s role in a society, or what it takes to maintain the US position as a world leader and a model for the rest. Just insisting for 5 years that President Obama was born in Kenya, was so silly that such statements alone should have made him ineligible for any governmental post.
How could this have been prevented? Should presidential candidates be required to show their tax returns, go through a thorough background check, and be subjected to an in-depth examination about various topics to demonstrate a certain level of understanding?
It shouldn’t be enough to refer to the Bible as the favorite book, or that the tax return is stuck in audit. For starters, it would help to abolish the electoral college, an anachronism that made the last two Republican presidents possible, – Bush with 271, Trump with 304, while Obama gathered 375 electoral votes and 52.7% of the popular vote.
I was interested Jorg, to see that you managed to have this particular blog entry published in the San Mateo Times as a letter to the editor. Congratulations, it drew comments.
Here is my comment:
Jefferson was right!
That is why the U.S. Senate was set up with two seats per state, regardless of the state’s population. That arrangement helps prevent bullying by the bigger states of the less populated ones. To some extent that is also true of of the Electoral College arrangement, as illustrated by the last presidential election.
Al Ward
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of the US states and the District of Columbia to award all their respective electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who wins the most popular votes is elected president, and it will come into effect only when it will guarantee that outcome. As of December 2017, it has been adopted by ten states and the District of Columbia. Together, they have 165 electoral votes, which is 30.7% of the total Electoral College and 61.1% of the votes needed to give the compact legal force.
If this had been in effect for the 2000 election, neither George W. Bush, nor Donald Trump would have been elected president. Let’s look forward to 2020, – which symbolizes clear-sightedness!
Imagine what a better world we would have had without the last two Republicans in the WH, and imagine the savings, in life, structural damage, moral decay, environment, and world respect.
Jorg, it is easy to see why Progressives would support NPVIC. That way they would be able to bully the other 47% of the population into paying for their misguided attempts to make the fairytale dreams and Wishful Thinking of the left to come true. Jefferson was right.