The juice is in the primaries

No, not THE Juice. I mean the sort of juice that means "really important stuff."

I'm coming to see the primaries as being so much more important than the general presidential election because it is there that we come up with our presidential material. Our real choices are there at the primary. Past the primaries we have dumb and dumber or smart and smarter or smart and dumb. We just have two to pick from and, guess what, if you're from one party or another your choice has been made for you. You just gotta pull the freakin' lever.

I know that personally I used to feel that the actual presidential election was THE election but as I have gotten older and observed politics I've noticed that it just isn't so. Ultimately the important elections are the ones closest to home. The precinctual, mayoral, state-wide, elections are the ones where the flavor of the country comes out and that is where most of our primary presidential candidates come from. So, obviously, if we have a large pool of highly qualified people from those offices running for president, we get better results - better national governments.

But, so many of us act like that's not the case. So many people wont even lift their bums from the couch and walk or drive a block or two to vote in an election unless it's a presidential election... and then the biggest mystery of all is that's when people come out of the wood-work to vote, when their choices have already been made for them. Not that it's not important to vote in the general election. It is. After all, once we've made our choice we do have to follow through and beat the dumber guy. No, the mystery is that we let a relative few (the people who vote in the primaries) decide for us (the rest of the poor hapless sods that vote in the general elections but who haven't voted in the primaries) who our choices will be.

Then we have 4-8 years.. and it's usually 8 with the power of encumbency what it is, to complain about our lack of choice and the rotten selection we have made.

That's all i wanted to say on this. This is very obvious stuff, really, so why did I say it? Probably, I said it because we all need to remind ourselves of this fact, everyday.

Creature's proposal: make voting participation mandatory and give a national PAID holiday for election days. In school we should teach political history covering both general political theory and the history of our current dominant political parties and various special interest groups. Who has the power and why