Tommywonk does not yet endorse any candidate. Dave Burris does.

Although there is nothing wrong with either option, it does carry relevance to how their blogs are perceived.

The one that has not yet endorsed or predicted a future winner, can still be perceived as an open source of information. The other, which has firmly committed to a certain candidate, has, even if it is unfairly so, been perceived as a tool of spin.

This is not entirely negative. If someone needs information on Mitt Romney, they now have somewhere to go where they can get answers to their questions.

However, if one is looking for inspired analysis, then the Mitt Romney website would most likely be expected to present just one side of the facts. After all, it is extremely counterproductive to do your opponent’s work for him. Let your enemy find the dirt for himself…..

Therefore it is with great hope and expectation that we look to our local blog sites to remained unaligned, at least for a large part of this exceedingly long campaign.

Instead, more attention should be given by us, to what we, as a select group of individuals. want to see in our candidates.

Obviously, any candidate worth his salt, will read a short list of local blogs daily. To not do so, would put that local candidate at peril. Today, being uninformed, or mis-stating an opinion over an airwave, that has already been exposed as weak within the blog’s community, is most surely steering one’s political campaign towards scalding water.

Since the advent of TV, and its media savvy marketers, our national candidates have needed tons of money to buy points to persuade us, the voter, to “buy their product” over the “product” of their competitors………..(let’s see…..Obama packaged like Aquafresh……….hmmm……..”both will leave a ‘clean‘ taste?….”)

We know this approach does not work. America can be, will be, and has been persuaded to “buy” into a candidate who is untested, untried, and unable to run the country. This happens with late night marketing all the time….how many of us have ever spent our hard earned money on an advertised product, only to fell gypped after we inspect the goods?

So what do I propose? Being somewhat of a classicist in nature, the ideal of a proper way to choose our leader, is the Athenian one, later copied by the early Romans, and that is to utilize the forum method. In this model each of the candidates presents their ideas to a forum of citizens, who then vote yea or nay upon the outcome. Some may say, “that is what takes place now” but there is a major difference between the forum approach and the marketing approach.

When we are marketed to, we are assailed on a lot of fronts simultaneously. We are taunted with logic, emotional persuasion, fear, (sex?), etc. and prodded with any method to get ourselves to make an emotional response…….one that is both quick…and long lasting.

This is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they set up our government. Most of them were no more than one or two generations removed from “THE AGE OF REASON.” What was obvious to them, and is now obfuscated from us, was how REASON made clear and empowered normal people to exercise control over their own destinies.

A forum is a public area where anyone who was literate. could espouse an idea. If the idea has merit, it gains traction among the audience; if it doesn’t, then the audience’s attention shifts to one that does. But for REASON to work, it has to be done with the printed word. For when we read, we use the most critical parts of our anatomy. But when subjected to electronic and visual images, we react and judge instinctively.

Sometimes instinctive judgments are effective and necessary, especially when driving at high rates of speed. But when complex issues get brought up for review, it is often better to let REASON take all the time necessary to analyze each side of an option, and then let REASON exercise the most prudent response.

Just one example, had America focused on the actual content of the 2000 Presidential debates and less on the sighs by one of the two candidates, (which have “what” to do with running this nation”), our social security, our national deficit, our economy and our well being, could have been in strong financial state right now. Instead, as a nation we allowed ourselves to be distracted.

If the future of this nation is to rise, or do the opposite, decline, whichever course America takes, it will be due to the accumulated results of actual decisions made by our governing bodies over time. It will not be based on some hot “American Idol” quality of leadership, or star-struck persona, lifted from the likes of Brittney Spears or Paris Hilton…..

For no corporation or board of officers, upon having a financial proposal brought before them, dismiss all the informative facts and vote yea or nay based on the “clean” teeth of the idea’s proponent. Instead they argue, yes argue, the pros versus the cons of that proposal at hand. And after all arguments are heard, a consensus is formed among a majority and a new direction of action is thus decided upon.

So what needs to happen in today’s political process? We need to utilize our newest technology and return to the basics of our democracy. Instead of emotionally locking onto a candidate, and throwing our support to them long before he/she has been tested, we ought to sit back, wait, watch, discuss, even argue, and enjoy the fun.

Then using our REASON, a capacity with which we all seem to have been more than adequately endowed, we need to leave a record for the informed public to see, and follow. Then with fingers crossed, we allow them to make up their own minds, and trust ourselves for better or worse, after all is said and done, to the results of their decisions.

The opposite of this is what historians will perhaps say was the most damning trait of this Republican administration….. Whereas the Founding Fathers fully trusted the informed electorate to listen to the evidence and make the right and proper decision, this current Republican administration does not. They obviously prefer to trust an uninformed electorate……….. for they go great lengths to keep the truth away from us. But the old saying is still true: where there is smoke, there’s fire……. It stands to REASON, that anyone THIS SNEAKY, is obviously up to no good.