Zell Miller is so candid because he's probably a fine person, but more influentially, because he's calling it quits. Except for isolated areas, politicians can't speak their minds and survive long enough to make a career. It's nearly impossible to tell if a politician really believes in what he/she is saying or saying what the voters want to hear. Ole Zell doesn't have to care anymore what the majority of the voters would think...it's a beautiful thing to see and hear the voice of common sense and reason from that hall.
It's a bad thing that everyone gets to vote. A stupid, emotionally driven person's vote counts as much as the vote of a person driven by reason, and there are more knee-jerk type thinkers than logical thinkers; probably many more. It should be no surprise that from this competition-for -votes evolve the career politicians we have, whose actions and opinions are driven by popularity...Did I say opinions? Silly me; politicians don't/can't have opinions until/unless immediately after poll results are posted. People don't like to think, or especially say, that passing out the voting franchise to any Tom, Dick, and Harry was very unwise (but perhaps unavoidable.) It's a CFS that the members of the franchise abused the privilege for so long. The franchise was expanded in an effort to say: "I'm sorry," or to buy votes from people being brought into the franchise, but dammit, ignorant people shouldn't vote. The original idea was to allow educated people to vote--the people who could understand the importance of containing the size and scope, and the importance of the de-centralization of government (still a very fresh concept to the human psyche)--so that it wouldn't have the infrastructure to control the people who didn't vote, but nonetheless were free. In my opinion, what I've written about in this paragraph is the reasons why a Republic can't indefinitely endure.
What I'm saying in almost always viewed as arrogance...I think it's just the truth...I think I'm thinking logically, and without regard to popular reactions to the message. That said, I don't know how the voting privilege--it isn't a Right, but it seems right--could be restructured in today’s polarized political atmosphere. I think it's impossible to put the cat back into the bag, and because our Federal Government has evolved into one with such a very large, powerful, far-reaching, and complex infrastructure that it would be unwise to change it back...it's too late as our government can now be what was feared by the Founders: the instrument of oppression. Every step of the debate process would be mired by racial, gender related, religion, etc., suspicion anyway. The average voter has come to think of an elected official as being a person more in tune to give me what I want instead of a person who will leave me alone. And too, considering what has happened in our academic halls the past couple of generations, and that information is so readily available, the political-thinking-gap between the educated and non-educated people is indiscernible.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the Constitutional Convention when voting was debated.
I would enthusiastically support a one term limit on every office except President and VP, or make their terms 6 or 8 years. Except for Party machinations, politicians would be more free to act logically than to be encouraged to act popularly. The core of the problem: why there aren't more Statesmen like Zell Miller, is because the self-aware greatly outnumber the politically aware.
Thanks fro reading this.