Real Campaign Reform Begins with Amending the U.S. Constitution.

Here's how I see it. We've have so many problems in Washington, it's difficult to know where to begin. The first move would be to throw the bums out, that is, don't re-elect anyone who has been in office longer than two terms as Congressman and one term as Senator.

By amending our consitution to require that each congressman's term in the House shall be four years, as will each Senator's term. No person may be re-elected until they have sat out for twelve years. In this way, those who run for political office for reasons of greed and power will lose their incentive if they can't stay in office longer than four years at a time. This gives more (let's call them regular or normal) Americans an opportunity to fulfill a role in government.

You see, the problem we have now is that as soon as a Congressman is elected, he must begin campaigning for the next election only two years away. This distracts him from his job, making his number one issue re-election. This is pure inefficiency. On the Senate side, six years is too long between elections. Most senators are poor (moderate) decision makers anyway, for some reason. We know this to be true in Washington and here in Virginia's General Assembly.

Another immediate step we should take is to outlaw Political Action Committee contributions. By the constitution, PAC members have the right to assemble and petition their government leaders. There just shouldn't be any money involved that can and does purchase allegiance and votes. Foreign contributions are already illegal, yet is was reported recently that the obamadent was given donations by some folks in the Gaza strip during his campaign. A better means of tracking funds needs to be developed, which probably already exists now that the government owns nearly half of two major U.S. banks, CitiGroup and Bank of America.

Given the increasing usurpation of authority by government, we probably won't have the right to vote in the future; but for now, a spending cap needs to be placed on all national and state elections as follows:

President/Vice-President: $5,000,000.00
Congressman/Senator: $ 500,000.00

Governor: $ 100,000.00
State Representative/Senator $ 25,000.00

With this cap, obviously some changes will need to be made on the campaign front. The first is with regard to teevee, radio, and internet advertising. Americans need to have uninterupted quality teevee programming like The Biggest Loser, Super Nanny, and King of the Hill, so no television ads should be allowed. Similarly, radio and internet are only here for our listening and browsing pleasure, so we don't want to hear or see the enemy lie about his opponent, even if ACORN did pay for the ad.

Candidates should be allowed two real debates in each state, one in March, and one at the end of October to allow candidates to shift their positions based upon polling and misquotes, misunderstandings, etc. Americans who actually care about their country can attend one of these events, or they can watch them on teevee or the internet, or they can listen to them on the radio. Those who don't care so much and who trust the newspapers to print truth can read the New York Times and Washington Post for their respective versions. One other note here, no follow-up commentary will be allowed by the media. We want to keep their role in life to a minimum!

No negative campaigning should be allowed. The candidate can only speak of his own record or what his own position is on an issue. Attacks on voting records are mostly contrived because whatever issue is mentioned is taken out of context and is usually part of a huge bill that the candidate either didn't read thoroughly or didn't understand very well. A good salesman always promotes his own product and never talks trash about the competition.

Finally, one direct mail piece can be mailed to each household. This is instead of the current unlimited standard where each voting member in each household receives between ten and twenty propaganda pages during one election. The campaign sends some, the state party send more, and special interest groups send even more. It is utterly ridiculous. Again, the no negativity law applies here as well.

Think how great it will be to enact these measures! We'll save paper and, therefore, trees, we'll save time, money and energy, and we'll all be less aggravated. It's a win/win/win for everyone...except the loser (but he'll feel better about losing)!