Dear President-Elect Trump:
Smoking kills. We know that. But we didn’t always. In fact, we used to celebrate smoking. Looking at these ads, we cringe. Did we really buy into that? In fact, we did.
Smoking was mainstream America. In 1955 57% of American males and 28% of females smoked. The America of 1946 didn’t conceptualize the nose dive that tobacco would experience in the next 70 years. By 2015, only 16.7% of males 13.6% of females smoked.
What happened? We awoke to the dangers of tobacco, and our own self interest and self preservation dictated that we change.
Now, it’s extremely un-cool to smoke.
Today, we accept and celebrate self-promotion to elected office as a sign of a republic standing strong in democracy. We take dishonesty and denigration as necessary evils in the electoral process. Candidates are political gladiators seeking to woo Americans by politically killing their opponents. Little wonder that fewer and fewer statesman appear on American ballots. All the while our republic weakens election after election with each inhalation of political filth.
Walt Kelly said it accurately: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
We expect candidates to demonstrate that they want the job by showing us how hard they will work to get elected and how much money they raise in the process. It is the candidate’s responsibility to persuade us to vote for him or her.
That is backwards thinking. It produces the kinds of elected officials who fail to balance budgets, who spend their time denigrating their opponents, and who spend more time working to be elected than working for us afterwards.
We will restore American greatness by changing our electoral paradigm.
Rather than picking from a handful of candidates who have spent years carefully crafting a message that promotes themselves while denigrating others, we ought to seek out wise men and women who have no desire to run, but who are willing to serve if elected. The best candidates are those whose arms we have to twist to run; not those who twist ours to vote for them.
Reversing the model—citizens looking for wise leaders, not candidates trying to persuade us—would produce a national congress of people who don’t need to be there—but who feel it their duty to serve.
Such a body would find solutions to our problems and would exemplify the kind of service we expect.
We need to make it un-cool to seek your own election.
If a decade or two from now, our children naturally cringe at the shameless self-promotion of today’s political advertisements, as we do with yesteryear’s smoking ads, we’ll be a healthier America.
It will require a complete change of electoral perspective. But doing so will save America.
So, let’s not wait for our elected leaders to bring us to greatness. Let’s stand up and start moving towards it ourselves.
Sincerely,
David O. Leavitt
