I Think We Lost the Election

I like me some P.J.  


http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/i-think-we-lost-election_516690.html?nopager=1




I Think We Lost the Election
How about politics without politicians?
P.J. O'Rourke
November 22, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 10
I think we lost the election on November 2. Every race was won by a politician. 
True, we elected some angry nuts. These are preferable to common politicians. 
Their anger provokes honesty, and their mental illness prevents honesty from 
being obscured by charm. (What a loss -Barney Frank would have been as an 
exemplar of the furious, insane left!) We also elected some amateur politicians. 
However, politics is like vivisection—disturbing as a career, alarming as a 
hobby. And we may have elected a few reluctant politicians. But not reluctant 
enough.
We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair 
behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are 
filled with people who wish they weren’t there.
In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a 
parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy 
pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And 
we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold 
stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society 
which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its 
Internet access screened and its allowance docked.
America’s elected and appointed officials ought to be longing to return to their 
personal lives and private interests. They should feel burdened by their powers, 
irked with their responsibilities, and embarrassed at their prominence in the 
public eye. When they say they want to spend more time with their families, they 
should mean it.
But how do we obtain this cadre of worthy citizens fidgeting unhappily in their 
honors and dignities? Given that politics is like war even more than it’s like 
vivisection, we could draft them. In World War II this worked out well. Randomly 
selected young and fit members of the Greatest Generation performed their duties 
admirably. Then again, in Vietnam, with the members of the following Notsohotso 
Generation, this didn’t work out well. Or, rather, it worked out well for the 
North Vietnamese. 
Maybe we could use our state lotteries. These are popular. The big winner would 
get millions of dollars for picking the right member, and the big loser would 
get a Senate seat for picking the wrong one. But people who play the lottery 
aren’t notable for their math skills. As Fran Lebowitz said, “The probability of 
winning the lottery is the same whether you buy a ticket or not.” We face 
enormous federal debts and deficits. In Washington the innumerate are already in 
charge. Do we want more of them?
In fact we have the solution to our problem—and have had it for ages. A jury of 
our peers is the oldest institution of political liberty. Let us be governed by 
a jury. This isn’t a quick or infallible fix. It took a couple of juries a 
number of years to put O. J. Simpson in jail. But juries work well enough to 
have endured since the Magna Carta. Political campaigns only seem to last that 
long.
Would juries be better than politicians? Would you rather confront a 
miscellaneous selection of your neighbors’ dogs or a pack of Rottweilers bred 
for generations to attack freedom and guard privilege?
Jury members would be less experienced than the present occupants of office. But 
what experience that ordinary people haven’t had is required to tell right from 
wrong? Is the experience of standing on street corners in fishnet 
stockings—metaphorically speaking (and literally speaking to you, Eliot 
Spitzer)—to be required?
Jurors would be ignorant about legislative and regulatory issues. And aren’t we 
all. Who, exactly, in this Congress and White House has read all 906 pages of 
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? Imagine a congressional hearing 
where the congressmen shut up and listened and actually wanted to learn 
something.
Certain individuals on juries would be naïve and easily suborned by special 
interests. They could turn out to be thieves. This has happened before in 
Washington. But who is more dangerous as a burglar—the thief who knows all about 
your valuables and where you keep them or the thief who’s never been in your 
house (or Senate) before?
There are, of course, no easy reforms in a long-established political 
system—except this one. The principles of jury selection are simple to apply to 
representational democracy, at least in respect to our elected officials. We 
don’t have to change the Constitution, we just have to change the Democratic and 
Republican nomination process, which is such a mess that any change would be 
uncontroversial. 
There’s a jury pool in every political district. Call up members of the pool for 
jury—that is to say, nominee—duty. Let voters in primaries act like prosecutors, 
defense attorneys, and judges, excusing some and dismissing others. When the 
pool has been culled to a reasonable size, the general election voters can pick 
whom they like. Nothing would prevent common politicians from running on third 
party or write-in tickets. But they’d be easily identifiable as what they 
are—politicians.
Then we’ll know when we’ve won an election: We’ll know we’ve won when every 
candidate who is voted in begins his or her acceptance speech by saying, “Oh, 
#@*!” 

P. J. O’Rourke, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author of a 
new book, Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards(Atlantic Monthly Press).

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