Although the next presidential election was over four years away, the whisperings about 2016 started on the Sunday political shows in the weeks following President Obama’s reelection in November 2012.
Thankfully, more pressing matters soon turned the attention of the TV folks elsewhere. Last year was, after all, quite agitated from a political perspective: important elements of the Affordable Care Act began to be implemented; the government shut down; and key sections of the Defense of Marriage Act were ruled unconstitutional.
But in the new year, the media has already turned its gaze to the next election drama. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday, host David Gregory asked Mitt Romney if he intended to attempt another run for the Oval Office in 2016. Some days earlier, former Florida governor Jeb Bush also hinted at the possibility that he might run for the highest office in the land, following in the footsteps of his father and brother. Several Democrats, too, have expressed an interest in making a move for the White House.
To say that all of this was disheartening would be the understatement of the year. I’m aware that the campaign starts early in this country, preposterously so compared to most countries. But let’s be honest here: two years is far too early; four years even more so.
I attribute part of this problem to the fact that the political scene in the U.S. is concerned primarily with individuals, not with parties nor ideologies. That is not to say that the latter two factors play no role in the election cycle, for they undoubtedly do. According to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, 93 percent of registered Republicans voted for Romney in 2012, while 92 percent of registered Democrats cast their votes for Obama.
Although the numbers do not come out and say it, people and politicians alike know there is a correlation between the politician’s personality and the likelihood that voters will elect him or her to a particular position. The underlying problem is that both the media and voters seem to value the personality of the politician more highly than anything else. Alas, there is no perfect method to mitigate America’s “personality effect,” but the drawn-out election cycle can hardly to help.
As usual, I turn to elsewhere in the world in search of possible solutions and alternatives. Take the United Kingdom, for example. While its governmental structures are vastly different from those on this side of the pond, there are valuable lessons to be learned from your linguistic cousins. General Elections—the closest thing the UK has to a presidential election, as they determine who will be prime minister—are held every five years. In the final year that a government is in office, typically in May or June, Parliament is dissolved and elections held no later than four weeks thereafter.
Although the news scene isn’t apolitical for the rest of the year—I’d even argue that Britain’s political landscape is far livelier than anything you can find in America—the “campaign” lasts no longer than those four weeks. This brief period is nothing short of a dream. There are no primaries, which means I don’t have to sit through two dozen different debates on TV in which the same talking points are tossed around ad nauseam. The man or woman who will become prime minister isn’t selected by some rubber-stamp convention which focuses on pageantry.
More importantly, because the prime minister is chosen indirectly by the majority party in Parliament, the most important political figure in the land is elected in a process that is largely divorced from the party’s leader. I might be generalizing somewhat, but the fact remains that British politics is largely free of the deadlock, personal attacks and virulent partisanship that have beleaguered American politics for so long. The election system in the UK is by no means perfect, nor should it necessarily be applied to the American context, but it is worth examination.
There is no need to change the fundamental structures of our electoral process. That said, we can learn from a system that values policies over personalities; it never hurts to look abroad for solutions to problems at home. No matter where the solution comes from, it is clear that American politics need an attitude adjustment to refocus what’s really at stake in this democracy.