Although I like Obama the most of all the contenders, certaintly over McCain and Clinton, we ought not to forget that Congress is the root of most of the problems in the nation, and that all these Persidential contenders are members of Congress and specfically the upper house, the Senate, where influience peddling is in its greatest effect, going back to the Founding of the nation in the U.S. Constitution in 1789.
That is, a big problem with America lies in the framework of the Constitution itself, and in the role of the Legislative branch in not acting. I know that to most Americans this is a heritical view, that the problem with government is in the founding document of the government, and that the Constitution as it sets up representive government with its bicameral legislature and separation of powers needs to be reviewed and changed if the Union has any real chance of surviving for very long.
The problem is what Congress has not done; what the legislative process has not delivered both in terms of service to the general welfare and to providing a check on the other two branches. All these candidates have been in the Congress at a time when it did not act to curb an exective which flaunts the intent of the Constitution, and for all the talk of reform and change, the more time they have been on the inside accepting the traditions of the government as it is; the urge to compromise just to get anything done and the tendency to not act, the less they will truely deliver. It is Congress that sets up the Federal beaucracy and to a large extant the state and local beaucracy under Federal laws, and this results in people going through the motions and delaying services while protecting their jobs. This is beyond partisanship as a negative effect, it is inefficiency run ranpet because a nation under law is also a nation that can wait under the burden of regulatory complexity. This is the pre-revolutionary state of a government rendered impotant by the sheer burden of its traditions. The candidates are powerful forces in this system.
Asside from the obvious constitutional changes, such as abolishing the Electroral College, we need to abolish the favoritism of the ruling plutocracy established by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers and reform the bicameral system. The Constitution does not specify the nature of political parties, but it does set up a leveragable winner-take-all system which needs to be reduced in strength of the control of Government is ever to have even a dim relation to democratic processes. We should consider reverting to both a single house of the legislative and adding a coelition form of governement. America may well decine as a world power as wealth is drained from it by globalism and as world leadership moves elsewhere, such as back to Europe. In order to mitigate the influience of plutocrats leveraging the duopoly, and to allow for more than two political parties a no-confidence vote ought to allow for setting up of elections. The current Consitution is guarenteed to splinter the Union, America may split into several nations by the end of this century as a result.
