I caught your reform thread on Community, and I appreciate where you're coming from.

I think that in order to change things for the better, we the people have to change some fundamental premises. We have to get over the crutch of looking for a hero to be President, someone who'll use the office to champion our own pet causes. It causes no end of trouble when a President goes into office with an agenda, and gives lie to the principle that the President serves all the people.

Instead, we should be looking for competent managers. Ross Perot had the right idea, though he might not have been the best candidate to put it into practice. We'd be wise to expect Presidents to be as non-ideological as judges (stipulating that in real life we need to reform that area too). We think a Supreme Court Justice should properly judge each case on its merits and consider only the law, so why shouldn't we equally expect a President to approach each new situation with the best interests of America as the only consideration?

I'd even go so far as to endorse drafting a President. We've sometimes justified the military draft on the grounds that America deserved the services of the best, and today with a voluntary military we don't hesitate to extend tours of duty as dictated by the needs of the service. If soldiers are that important to the country, isn't their Commander-in-Chief of ultimate importance?

If you were the proverbial Martian coming to America for the first time, would you pick the two political parties as the entities best qualified to pick the best candidates to lead the country? To an objective observer the idea is absolutely insane. To get a competent President without an ideology, we first have to kill off the institutions of ideology that allow only ideologues to run for the office. Our basic challenge is to break the parties' stranglehold on the political process.

In other words, I"m not so much a liberal as an unrealistic utopian, most days. On my dystopian days, I fear that this partisan bickering is as good as it gets with the system we have. If we ever want to get along, we have to change the rules of this game that obligate us to fight.