There are 250 workdays in a year.  At eight hours a day, that is two thousand working hours.  If a Congressional candidate made a full time job out of campaigning during the two years between elections, and spent fifteen minutes per constituent household, they could personally visit with sixteen thousand families.  Since a House member only needs 50% +1 votes to win, then you could have Congressional districts with thirty-two thousand households where the candidates would not have to rely on media money to get elected.

Article 1, Section 2, Part 3 of the US Constitution stipulates the size of Congressional districts.   The original drafts suggested one  Representative for every forty thousand, but George Washington supported the revision of one representative for every thirty thousand on the grounds that it would increase the legitimacy of the new government to have a sufficient number of Representatives to support regular contact between the citizens and their Congressmen.

So reducing the roll of money in politics is as simple as revisiting the wisdom of the founding fathers.  One Representative for every thirty-two thousand households in a nation of over one hundred million households means the House of Representatives would have over three thousand members.  This may seem an impossible number to make work, but consider this.  The current four hundred and thirty-five members of Congress have personal and committee staffs that number over eight thousand.  In other words, it takes thousands of people to do the legislative work of a country as big as the US, but instead of electing them directly and holding them accountable to constituents they know personally, the Congress voted to cap their own membership.  This decision in 1911 was justified in the debate by citing the physical constraints of the room in which they met.  So instead of building a bigger room, or a closed circuit TV network so that accountable Representatives could actively participate in the governing of our country, the Congress made a choice that destined the elected Representatives to a life of full-time fund raising and left the governing to their unelected unaccountable staffs and the DC money men who trade media money for votes.

If you think making the House seven times more representative and accountable is too big a leap for a single cycle, how moving to one thousand Representatives.  The subsequent reapportionment debate and the idea of fundamentally moving the federal government back toward the original vision of the founding fathers will certainly reengage a great number of the voluntarily disenfranchised.  So ask the Congressional candidates you meet in 2008 if they support expanding the size of the House.  Term limits are unconstitutional, but the current limit on the size of the House certainly violates the spirit of the Constitution and a move to expand the size of the House to at least one thousand would have no problem in the Supreme Court.

 We live in a great country with more opportunity to share thoughts and opinions than any other country that ever existed.  The ancient Greeks, renowned for their citizen participation, left most of their population disenfranchised through gender or slavery.  So we get to hear more from more people which makes our country stronger.  Everyone should speak up and share their opinion.

My opinion is that all the talk taking place at this stage of the presidential campaign is taking place amongst a very tiny niche of the people who should be participating.  I also encourage everyone in the debate to remain as cordial and inviting as possible to encourage more of the main stream Republican party to engage and stay involved through the primary process.  There is a very real possibility that we could hand the Presidency to our first woman candidate by allowing a very focused and motivated group of activists to hijack the nomination.  Let's get everyone talking so the citizens of this country can hear what the real Republican party sounds like.

Nancy Pelosi is either clueless or beyond cynical, but in either case her strategy will ultimately lead to her failure.  In 2006, thanks to the blunders of Karl Rove, the American electorate was both pissed off about Iraq and tired of Bush.  Pelosi's strategy is to constantly remind the American electorate of those two facts.

Karl's first failure was choosing to sell the war in Iraq with a convenient truth that turned out to be false.  We should be in Iraq doing exactly what we are doing, but the case is very complicated and has nothing to do with WMD.  Rove decided the American public was too dumb or too selfish to get the real reason, so he decided to use fear instead.  If Bush had made the real case, we would have expected the current state of affairs and been willing to sustain those sacrifices for the ultimate goal.

The Baker Policy Institute is home to the political science department of Rice University in Houston, Texas.  Two faculty, Rick Stoll and Cliff Morgan, have produced groundbreaking work in the field of international relations.  This academic research shows that there is only one factor so universally applicable in the study of war that it can be called a "law" rather than a theory.  This one fact is, true democracies do not fight each other.  In order to have war, you must have dictatorship (fascist or socialist) or anarchy on at least one side.  The implication is that a world made up of true democracies would have no war.

Rick Stoll and Cliff Morgan have the ear of James Baker.  Baker has the ear of George 1.  George 1 has the ear of George 2.  George 2 thinks creating peace in the middle east would be a greater accomplishment that Ronald Reagan's legacy of democratizing Eastern Europe.  So before 9/11, George 2 was already thinking about ways to democratize the Arab world.  The problem with this thinking is that it fails to account for the contextual differences between Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  Prior to the Soviet era, Easter Europe enjoyed a short but significant exposure to the institutions that provide the foundations for democracy.  Unfortunately, prior to Saddam, Iraq was ruled by a different henchman who used the same cult of personality methods and violent oppression to hold power.  Use the experience of Olympic athletes as a metaphor to understand these differences.  When a Romanian Olympian failed, they lost their nice apartment and spent the rest of their days working in a shoe factory.  When an Iraqi Olympian failed, they lost their left hand and their sister was gang raped by secret police.  This produces a different psychology that makes democracy building a little more challenging.  And we knew this before we started.  And it's still worth the sacrifice.  But Karl was either too lazy or too inadequate to make this case to the country.

So we went in to Iraq on the premise that they posed a direct threat in the form of WMD, instead of the premise that the country posed one of many barriers to stable and peaceful coexistance on the planet.  George 2's challenge over the next two years is to educate the country about international relations.  I suggest he bypass Karl and go straight to the source.  Get Rick Stoll and Cliff Morgan to start writing his speeches.  Once Iraq and Afghanistan have stable democracies capable of protecting themselves within and without, our attention will necessarily move to Syria and Iran.  Hopefully, we can engage some assistance from other developed countries to get there.  In the mean time, Bush cannot count on any support from Pelosi's congress unless he comes clean about the real strategy.

In addition to keeping Iraq in the headlines, Pelosi's '08 strategy is to remind everyone that Bush is an idiot.  People definitely voted against Bush in '06, but he's not on the ballot in '08.  The only way the Democrat's current strategy of beating up on Bush will make sense is if the Christian right monopolizes the Republic primary process again and sends another born again Bush copy into the general election.  Having God on our side is great as an ace up the sleeve, but when it becomes a central tenet of foreign policy strategy we are in big trouble.  We need a President who is comfortable with his faith in God, but has faith in rationality when making policy decisions.

So Nancy will keep getting meaningless Iraq resolutions on C-Span and take every opportunity to get Bush commenting on his policies.  If Bush, or one of the Republican nominees, makes the true case for being in the Middle East, then the natural progress of the campaign will take attention off the incumbent president.  Candidates for Congress in '08 will get to show their constituents what a waste of time Pelosi's congress really was and she will lose the House.

The recent comments by Senator McCain about Secretary Rumsfeld's leadership have sparked an interesting debate within this forum.  Rather than sniping at each other, I suggest we try and diagnose the problem so it doesn't happen again.

My hypothesis is that Bush failed to clearly communicate his overall strategy to Rumsfeld.  However, I also suspect that Rumsfeld was a little reluctant to hear what his commander-in-chief was telling him.  Bush hopes his legacy is a democratized middle east.  Ambassador Derijian, Rick Stoll, and the rest of the gang at the Baker Policy Institute have been promoting the idea that democracies don't fight each other to the Bush family for years.  Bush 1, with his CIA experience, was probably a little more cynical about the results of a power vacuum.  Bush 2, who thinks God is on our side and democracy is the natural state of man, really bought in to the regional democratization idea.

When Bush won the election, he was already looking for a way to begin the democratization process.  The attacks on 911 made Afghanistan the clear candidate to begin the process and force rather than diplomacy the clear method.  We probably would have remained focused on Afghanistan until the country was stable, had Saddam not made such an a$$ of himself.  Throwing out the inspectors and refusing to share the documentation of the transport or destruction of the chemical weapons discovered during the first gulf war, just gave Bush the excuse he needed to move on to country #2 on an accelerated time table.

If the Prez had made clear to Don that the strategic planning for the military should be grounded in the vision of regional democratization in the middle east, then things probably would have turned out differently.  Rumsfeld wanted to build shock troops and quick strike mobility.  His vision was quick assault and limited exposure.  Rumsfeld, who I believe is significantly more intelligent than our current commander-in-chief, undoubtedly learned from the Russian fiasco in Afghanistan.  His strong belief that an occupying force could never succeed in this region impaired his willingness to fully serve the President.

So the conversation probably went something like this...

Bush:  Don, we have to get rid of Saddam so the Iraqi people can elect a legitimate government and serve as an example for the rest of the region.

Rumsfeld:  So you want me to get rid of Saddam.

Bush:  Yes, Don.  With the dictator out of the way, democracy will flourish and the Iraqi people will know freedoms they have been denied for generations.

Rumsfeld:  So you want me to get rid of Saddam.

Bush:  Yeah, get rid of him and we'll show the rest of the region that democracy can provide stability and a quality of life far beyond what they ever imagined possible.

Rumsfeld:  Great Mr. President.  This is just the mission we've been preparing for.  We can be in Bagdad before they know what hit 'em.  Saddam will have no command and control of his troops within a couple of days, and we'll have him on the run within weeks.

Bush:  That's great Don.  Then the Iraqi people can begin to build their new country using democracy and personal liberties as the foundation for their legitimate government.

Rumsfeld:  They'll think God himself is coming for Saddam.  Shock and Awe, baby.

Bush: Okay...well...that's fine Don.  Once Saddam is gone, we can begin the process of establishing security so the Iraqis can get on with their destiny of taking control of their lives back from a despot.

Rumsfeld:  Right.  We're so right on for this mission, I'll make Powell and Schwarzkopf look like amateurs.  And get the whole thing done for half what we spent on Desert Storm.

Bush:  That's fine Don.  Then they'll have their elections and we'll have a democratic axis running right through the region, Afghanistan-Iraq-Israel.  With a friendly Jordan and Turkey providing stability, we can work on the Palestinian crisis, then turn to Syria and Iran.

Rumsfeld:  Don't worry Mr. President, Saddam is as good as gone.

The secretary was probably right, given the lack of institutions to support a democracy and the politically charged and militarily equipped factions within the country.  But the point is, the commander-in-chief had a different agenda, even if it was wrong.  Rumsfeld should have either convinced Bush of the impossibility of his wished for legacy or resigned and let someone who bought the President's vision run the show.

We are in trouble.  The foundation of our republic is eroding and it is systemic, not personal.  We could have the most talented and sincere individuals in the world serving in Congress and the system would overwhelm their good intentions.  When good people cannot solve the systemic problem, it's time to change the system.  Or in our case, change the system back to its original design.

I invite everyone to read Catherine Drinker Bowen's book "Miracle at Philadelphia."  I have felt a deep sense of helplessness and foreboding about the federal government for many years.  I found in this book, a better understanding of the underlying cause of our problem.  And you will know it as well if you look in the Constitution at Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3, third sentence.  This is where the founding fathers stipulated the Congressional ratio of representation.  Drinker Bowen reconstructs the debate over this number and shows the prescience of George Washington in his argument for a smaller number to ensure the citizens' attachment to their government.  His argument was that a smaller ratio would decrease the degrees of separation between a member of the House and his constituents.  Closer connections would encourage participation in the electoral process and bestow legitimacy on the new regime.

In 1911, Congress voted to officially ignore the Constitution and cap the number of representatives at 435.  As the population has continued to increase, the degrees of separation has increased to the point where the vast majority of a member's constituents know her only through the TV commercials purchased with special interest money.  If we change back to the ratio stipulated by George Washington and the founding fathers, we would have about the same number of people wandering the halls of Congress and about the same budget.  The big difference is that they would all be elected instead of appointed.

Right now, a Congressman is basically a fundraiser figurehead who goes around promising special interests and his big money constituents favorable votes in exchange for campaign contributions.  All the legislative work gets done by staff.  The leadership and committee staff talk to the congressman's staff and work out the deals that will allow the Congressman to deliver on his money-raising promises while maintaining the party agenda.  These staff members are a heady bunch, making policy decisions that impact our lives with no direct accountability.  The Congressman has to spend all her time fundraising because Congressional campaigns are topping $5M.  That means a Congressman has to raise $7,000 every single day of their career.  In other words, from 7AM to 7PM, the Congressman has to ring in another $575 every hour of every day they are in office to position themselves to win the next election.  And the scary part is that 95% of them are successful at it.  The incumbency rate in the House is staggering. 

The founding fathers had the right idea.  With a ratio of representation of one congressman for every thirty thousand citizens, the will of the people would be expressed or an unhappy challenger would spend a few months going door to door to earn enough votes to kick the incumbent out of office.  With one congressman for every six hundred thousand people, the potential challenger has to go to the same money men who are paying the incumbent for his votes.  Why would these guys back a new horse when the safe bet is to stick with the guy already in office?  The only time the answer to that question is back the challenger is when the incumbent gets out of line and starts voting her conscience.  The system is broken but we have a chance to right the ship if enough people realize where we went wrong (in 1911) and reinstate the checks against the aristocracy that Washington and Madison wrote into our founding contract.