I am not an electable candidate. I, as a human, am the kind of individual many might call flawed. But believe me when I say I have the nation's best interests at heart as I write this diary.
I myself could never get elected. I am an athiest. I've viewed porn, more than once. I have an internet presence somewhere out there in the ether where I'm certain I've said something in my younger days that I would regret or be ashamed of now. I had a difficult time fitting in when I was younger, and there's many people who would remember me as abrasive, arrogant, and at times just "different". It took a lot of work from some wonderful people to help me change those ways. But I still have little patience for ignorance, and even less for incompetence. I've walked into a Spencer's gifts at some point in my life and placed some unsavory gag gift on my credit card. I've argued with people on facebook for the sole purpose of pissing them off because I know just how wrong they are and watching the stupid fly off the handle is entertaining. And I recognize that capitalism is an unsustainable economic model that will eventually implode under its own incessant grind towards ever greater consumption.
I am.... Not.... An electable candidate.
However, I know what one needs to win. I know what our representatives should be saying. Continue below for the message we need, even if its not the one we all may unanimously want.
The Economy
Our candidate needs to push hard for better local jobs. Better wages, better benefits, jobs that require skilled training and can pass for a manageable career. We need a higher minimum wage, a stable, secure and robust social security system, and a closure of the income gap. Capitalism only works when those who are the target consumers actually have capital to trade for the things they need or want to consume. Strengthen our ability to insure people through Obamacare and medicaid.
Civil Rights
Equal rights for women, equal rights for minorities, equal rights for all sexual orientations, equal rights for the handicapped. People are people, none are lesser, none are greatter, as we are all different and nobody can walk the same path as anybody else and guarantee that they could have done better. The only appropriate option is to assume that they're just as human as we are and afford them the same rights and responsibilities that we would want if we were to take their place. Even if our decisions are ultimately different, our available options need to be the same. No more anti abortion laws. No more voter id laws. No more attempts at an official religion. No more disproportionately targetting minorities for harsher sentencing terms than white people for the same crime. Absolutely no more tolerance of "afluenza" defences. Everybody, absolutely everybody, no matter how wealthy, needs to pay the appropiate consequences for their actions based on the damage they have caused.
Education
What good is an education if the quality of that education is diminished by draconian standardised testing measures in the early years and crippling financial debt later? Bring back stronger public education systems with stronger teacher's unions. Forgive, mitigate or otherwise cure the student loan plague infecting the nation. We need to eliminate the idea of education being a profitable venture option for corporations and businesses. Education is not a business, its the only opportunity we get to learn the skill sets we will ultimately use to survive.
Freedoms and Restrictions
We need responsible gun laws that keep lethal weapons out of the hands of criminals, the mentally ill, and the otherwise unstable. We need to responsibly legalize marijuana.
Environmental Regulations
There can be no compromise on the safety of our food, water, air, or land. We need strict environmental protections to make sure we don't poison the well in the name of the allmighty dollar and turning a short profit. We need climate change awareness and progress on a remediation plan that acrually matters.
Financial Regulations
The same goes for banks and massive corporate monopolies. We need to get back to seriously regulating financial services and working on some serious trust busting regarding monopolies. The economy is not a game, it is an engine driving the system we rely on for continued survival. Manipulation of market functions for the bebefit of the few needs to stop. Personally, I believe the stock market to be the single worst financial invention in the history of the human race. Investing in the growth of a business should never have been allowed to fall to the whims of a fluctuating market that does not function in accordance with actual economic realities but rather on speculation. The stock market will not go away, but it must be heavily regulated, the most potentially damaging functions of it stripped away and illegalized, and the whole thing simplified for the sanity of the whole economy.
Political Rules
We need some serious campaign finance reform. Nullify the citizens united decision immediately and resolve this perpetual headache by limiting campaign spending significantly with a hard ceiling limit and limiting advertising to that which is run by the candidate alone. No more outside interests buying advertising.
Domestic Policy
We must reign in the domestic spying program. We must demilitarize the police. We must provide for the safety and well being of the populace without becoming an Orwellian surveillance and police state. We must require significantly more stringent requirements of all police departments, ideally a consolidation of all local departments under the umbrella of state police offices that can be sanely controlled and regulated by the state. There is no logical reason why every municipality or township needs to struggle with law enforcement and jurisdictional issues when a consolidation of those funds and departments into the state police systems would be more efficient, less costly, and provide more accountability to the services provided than what occurs under local jurisdictions.
Journalism
Must be more regulated than is currently allowed to pass for "news". It should not be legal for corporations to state whatever they damn well please under the guise of bad journalism without suffering the consequences that should rationally be incurred for spreading lies, misinformation and deceit to an otherwise unwitting populace. If you promise to be spreading news, then you should only be reporting factual, truthful information, in context, without omission of accurate evidence contrary to the narrative, and without giving false equivalency to inaccurate information that supports an alternative narrative to the provable facts of reality.
Empowering Facts and Science
Nothing should be more important in education or news than facts and science. This reaches broadly across education, journalism and politics. We, as a people, need to stop giving legitimacy to bullshit. There is no such thing as "pseudoscience". Even putting the word science in that description is a discredit to science and a misleading name. There is science, and there is bullshit. There is no pseudoscience.
Elections
Election day needs to be a national holiday, and voting needs to be compulsory. No more questionable turnouts. You vote, always.
As I said, maybe this list isn't going to perfectly fit everybody's ideas, and that's too bad, because it's what this country needs to actually be the best in the world. It's not enough to simply say we are, we need to actively work, as a people, towards that end.