An excerpt from today's polisci assignment. (I wrote this.) The topic: the presidential selection process. Thoughts?

"The current process of selecting a president, in my opinion, relies too heavily on an uneducated and apathetic citizenry. The whole process has become a popularity contest of stupefying proportions. Because Presidents are dependent on popular votes to serve in office they must necessarily cowtow to public opinion. This sounds good except for two things: first and foremost most people today have no clue about current events, and many receiving a distorted version of reality provided by mass media and their financial interests. Secondly, this leads us directly to the problem which lead the framers to create the Electoral College in the first place: too much power in the hands of the president and the tyranny of the majority.

Each period marked in the history of presidential selection, also marked an increase in the power that the president held. Where George Washington SERVED the American people, it seems today that many who run for office do so for self-gain or to push their own political agendas. Today the president makes his decisions based on congressional opinion, public opinion, the opinions of bankers and big business, and according to the opinions of other major interest groups. It is my opinion that the president should be beholden solely to the constitution. It occurs to me that there is so little in his job description laid out by the constitution, because the job isn’t supposed to be a big deal. The power is supposed to lie in the congress and the people, not in the president.

Unfortunately, people today believe that the Electoral College limits “true democracy”. So, turning back the clock to the days of the “original period” certainly wouldn’t go over well. This is ironic to me. If people realized that they give away their own power by increasing that of the president, they would certainly have a whole different view on the process. At this point, in order to make any changes to how the president is selected, there would have to be major changes to the function of the executive branch as well. I am hopeful some day we will dial back government, and return to something that more closely resembles what our nation was meant to be."