Imagine being able to vote your heart and your conscience, having a chance to choose the candidate who best represents your views, without having to sacrifice pragmatism. And doing it in a couple months of campaigning, rather than a couple years!
That’s what the French get. By requiring their presidents to be elected by over half the voters who care to show up, in their first round their citizens can support the candidate they would most like to see as president.
If no one gets over half the vote, then they get the choice we always have, between the two candidates with the biggest constituencies (or poltical machines) be they centrist or liberal or conservative.
Well, the French runoff system will never happen here, because it would mean the corporate and special interests who have a $trangehold on our system would have to share power.
But it would mean we, as individuals, could support a Ralph Nader or Ross Perot and, even more important, we could help nurture the movements behind the Naders and Perots into viable, ongoing political forces. Our diversity, that individuality we theoretically so pride ourselves upon, could be expressed. However rugged that individuality really is.
And it might also well mean that in ’92 George Bush would have defeated Bill Clinton or that in 2004, without Nader siphoning off votes, Kerry would have carried enough states such as Ohio to be elected.
Imagine the stupidity that might have saved us. (An NHL goalie was once asked what it’s like to have a goal scored on him. He answered, it’s like standing out on the ice with your pants down around your ankles. And that’s pretty much where Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and Co have led us. As a peoples. We Americans are out on the ice, with the whole world in the stands looking down at us, with our pants down around our ankles.)
And it isn’t ongoing months and months of campaigning! They have defined periods for running ads on TV, for getting the message out there without the relentless bombardment that renders us so weary and cynicial. Then they vote and are done with the campaigning rascals for a good long while.
That might even be the best part.
I look at the French system with immense admiration. But as mired as our system is in its traditions and lobbyists and electoral college, it’ll never happen here.
OmbudsBen 
Zut! Alors! You ended on a pessimistic note, but isn’t it possible? Seems like they’re always looking at campaign reforms, maybe there’ll be a change in the system, especially if Americans continue to be disillusioned with who we get.
Go Royal! I’m dubbing Sarkozy ‘little Hitler’ for the meanwhile.
I like your icon or avatar or whatever–classy. Isn’t it going to be starry everywhere now?
I hope you’re right, and some day it’s seriously considered. Yes, go Royal!
Good post. I didn’t know half of these things about the French system. You are right – we are standing out here on the ice with our pants down around our ankles – hockey notwithstanding.
I wonder what it would take for that kind of reform to our systems? Right again – I really can’t see it happening.
But we can dream.
QM
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