Monday, March 15, 2010

Political Wife Swap

Justin McKeating argues:

If you are the sort of person who approves of, or allows their voting preference to be swayed even a little by, the interventions in our electoral process by the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, you are a moron who should be interned until after the general election.

I completely agreed with this until I thought of an even better idea.

The position of Prime Minister’s Spouse should be directly, and separately, elected. So we could pair Gordon with Samantha, Dave with Sarah, or maybe even Nick (Clegg) with Nick (Griffin). The possibilities are as endless as the attention span of an ITV early evening news viewer.

The morons would vote for the spouse, and the rest of us would vote for the actual government. Everyone gets to engage with the election on terms that they can understand.

(Via Chris.)

4 comments:

Matt M said...

Let's take the reality show idea to its logical conclusion - Put all the party leaders in the Big Brother house, have them perform a series of wacky tasks, then vote them out one by one. The last guy left in gets to run the country.

Or we could just leave them in there.

tim f said...

Hmmmm, I'm not sure about this. One of the factors that swayed my (completely meaningless, as I didn't have a vote) decision to support Obama over Clinton was Michelle Obama - her politics & her background made her a much better sounding board and influence on the President than Bill Clinton would've been imo. When you're contained in a bubble like in the White House, I think those things matter.

There were also lots of Americans who were reassured by Obama's choice of partner in that he chose to marry someone with darker skin than him rather than a white woman. (Obviously that wasn't the criteria on which he made his decision, but that fact that that was the case was revealing and reassuring about his character to many people.)

Sorry to make a serious point on a light-hearted post.

PooterGeek said...

Why is it "reassuring and revealing about his character" that a mixed-race man marries a woman with darker skin than him?

tim f said...

To most people it made absolutely no difference. To some people it showed that he didn't see her as a trophy wife & it showed that he wasn't desperate to impress white people by marrying a woman with lighter skin than himself. Now, I'm not claiming those things even entered his mind when he decided to propose to Michelle Obama - she's clearly a highly intelligent, strong and compassionate person and that ought to be enough on its own. But equally I'm not going to tell those people that their judgement is irrelevant to their voting decision - we live in a democracy and people get to decide what matters to them.