Vote Washington!

I doubt George Washington could have gotten himself elected in 2012

Well, he has been dead for 213 years.  Pretty well limits his campaign speeches.  

More importantly, I'm referring to the amount that the political landscape has changed since Washington was elected unanimously.  Sure, he was a respected military leader and businessman, not to mention one of America's greatest presidents, but Washington has some flaws that would have been relentlessly attacked by today's media, making enough people hate him so that he would be unelectable.  

First, there's the fact that he wasn't a member of a politcal party.  You can be as popular and whimsical and rich as you want (Just ask Ross Perot), but if you don't have the full backing of one of two groups of people (Democrats or Republicans), you have no chance of getting elected.  The best ever performance of a third-party candidate in a presidential election?  Theodore Roosevelt, running under the "Bull Moose Party" in 1912, to a whopping 27.4% of the popular vote.  That's just not getting it done, folks. 

One of the biggest issues in this year's election is how rich politicians are out of touch with the rest of the people in the country.  (The whole 99% debate)  This is one of the sticking points in Mitt Romney's campaign...the fact that he's not worried about the poor, and thinks that handing somebody 50 bucks out of his wallet at a photo op somehow cures all of a person's financial woes.  I'm not making that up.  Well, should Romney secure himself the White House, at a net worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $200Million, he would be only the second richest president in US history.  Who was the first, you may ask?  None other than George Washington, who owned over 8000 acres of prime farmland (back when farming was profitable) and had a net worth of well over $500Million. 

Oh yeah...George Washington owned slaves.  Sure, that was socially acceptable back then, but today's political action committees sure aren't going to let that ruin a perfectly good attack ad slamming Washington for something that would certainly be a human rights violations today.  (Remember the Clinton didn't inhale thing?)

Washington proclaimed the United States to be neutral in times of European wars, something which would be branded as weakness today.  Washington raised taxes...in the sense that there really was no government to collect taxes before Washington created it.  That's a cardinal sin in today's government.  Those taxes went to support bigger government in the form of infrastructure improvements, commerce improvements, military spending, you name it.  If people had health insurance back then, you can bet Washington would have supported that, too.  

So you see...even though we all remember George Washington as a great president, it's important to note that if he had been alive today, he wouldn't have even gotten the chance to become president.  The election system would have done away with him too quickly, leaving only a hollow shell of a party windbag for the voters to pick.  It's a little sad.  Think about that during the next presidential debate.