Vote for the Crook. It's Important.

I truly wish I could say "only in Louisiana." I guess to a certain extent, I can. Nowhere else that I know of do they have celebrity bartender nights featuring former governors, or bumper stickers that read "vote for the crook. It's important." And I feel confident that even if those two things were true other places, you'd be hard-pressed to find people chanting to re-elect someone that just finished serving 10 years in the federal penitentiary for embezzlement and corruption charges. But that was just another Tuesday evening for me in downtown New Orleans.

Let's back up for a minute and explain. Edwin Edwards was the governor of Louisiana for like 4 different terms over the last 40 years. He's 84 now, and he literally JUST got out of the federal pen this year. His most recent election was in the 90s, when he ran against former KKK Wizard David Duke. If you've listened to really old bounce music from New Orleans, one of the first beats to become popular featured "**** David Duke" on loop. David Duke was understandably quite unpopular with the minorities of Louisiana, among others, and it led to a serious third-party campaign which endorsed Edwin Edwards with the phrase "Vote for the crook. It's important." Everyone knew E2 was a thief. But at least he wasn't a Klansman. Truly, this represents the triumph of the lesser-of-two-evils philosophy of voting.

What's important here, I think, is not so much to dwell on how funny/terrible that election was, or how cool it is that former governors tend bar in New Orleans for a night just so that their loyal supporters can sit around and talk about how much better they would be doing in the current situation than Bobby Jindall is (although that was quite an experience). I think it's important for us to think about how and why we end up with this false dichotomy of having to choose one of two candidates, and this serious difficulty of not really supporting either one. How did the people of Louisiana find themselves choosing between the crook and the racist?

Well, as in all things, there are tons of complications and nuances when we get into the specifics of those two people and the political climate of Louisiana at the time, but I'd like to focus on the more basic issue of the way that one becomes an option at all in this political world that we observe and sometimes feel like we participate in. You get on the ballot (read: become an option) when you get endorsed by a major party, or when you get some largely inaccessible amount of people to signal that they support your candidacy (before you're on the ballot, mind you). That means that you pretty much either need to have a lot of support from people already within power in the party, or you need to have enough independant power and wealth to get your message out to a ton of people outside of the election process. Most people understand the importance of a republic over a democracy in that we need people we support to make decisions for all of us, because those of us that are doing real jobs that make the country run day-to-day don't all have the time, information, perspective, education, and/or intellect to decide what is in our best interest and how to pursue it for every single issue that comes up. That's why we elect a small group of (theoretically) elite people to make those decisions on our behalf, and we expect that those people will work in our best interests because we elected them to do just that, and we picked the person that we thought would be best at doing just that.

But somehow in the process of outsourcing decision-making about what we should do as a country to state-wide and national delegates, we've also outsourced the decision-making about who should be the decision-makers. That's where things get dangerous. We, as a people, lose our agency when we no longer control the fates of our politicians, which is what happens every time a primary goes by that no one cares about. If you had to choose between the primaries and the actual election, you really have more of an opportunity to shape policy by voting in the primary that the actual election. I'm not one of the people that thinks we should throw out the two-party system all together and open up elections to be a free-for-all. I've seen multi-party systems that worked and that failed, and I think that even the ones that succeed lend themselves even more to the base political tactics of favor-trading that lines pockets without solving any problems. But I think that the nomination system for parties needs to be more vigorous and accessible, and that's as much our fault as the big, rich, born-and-bred politicians behind the curtains at the National Conventions. Until we demand options that are better than and different from what we've been dealing with, we're not going to get anywhere. That means changing our focus in a few ways. That means focusing more on who makes it INTO and OUT OF the primaries, instead of waiting for the candidates to be selected before we consider the election to have begun. It also means focusing less on what law school a potential candidate went to, and more on what they've done with their lives. Finally, it means focusing on answers instead of rhetoric. I love rhetoric. I got my BA in rhetoric. But if we really want to get answers from our candidates at debates instead of double-speak, how about not voting for anyone that doesn't give concrete answers in debates? How's that for a movement? Watch all the debates during primaries, and keep track not only of what answers people gave, but who answered the questions at all. If you can't tell me what you believe in, either you don't know the answer or you're too weak to defend yourself to people who disagree. Either way, I don't want you to represent me.

Maybe if we pay more attention to the things that matter in a candidate and how people become one, we can improve the entire field. But if my options are to vote for the crook or the Klansman, I'll vote for the crook every time. It's important.