Last Friday I saw a news story about how part of Hillary Clinton's campaign money is being spent on "Salon Campaigns". According to the story, "Clinton and Obama are battling for black women voters, now evenly split between the two of them [in South Carolina]", and the Clinton campaign is now spending money to try to win the support of black women when they visit their regular hair salon. Implied but not explicitly stated is the idea that their campaign activities go further than putting "Clinton '08" signs in the window, and involve somehow convincing the hairdressers to talk up their chosen candidate, educating people about Clinton's policies and goals once in-office. Clinton's campaign reports they've recruited nearly 1,000 salon owners.
When I was doing some searches online on the subject, I found this article which indicates that the Obama campaign is also going the salon campaign route in attempt to sway the black women vote, which makes up 29% of all Democratic primary voters in South Carolina. It doesn't say how many salon owner's they've recruited, but the Obama campaign has "organized a network around beauty salons, a central gathering spot for black women, particularly in rural areas like [rural Eastern South Carolina]."
I can understand that these two campaign groups feel that they need to chase this vote, and that the "Salon Campaign" really could change which of these candidates gets the majority vote in South Carolina. But actions like this make me take a step back and consider how ridiculous our whole campaign process is. More often than not, when a pundit is discussing who is winning a campaign race, you'll hear them discussing how much money a candidate has available to spend, or how much they have spent so far on their campaign. I can only assume that these campaigns continue this kind of activity (and continue to get financing for these activities) because they know that every advertisement, every bumper-sticker, and every thumbs-up from an "impartial" hair salon owner gets their candidate just a little closer to being elected.
Instead of spending money on banners, speeches, billboards and door-to-door campaigners, I'd like to see our political candidates spend the money on something worthwhile. If candidates want to prove they can fill the role of president, I would like them to show me, rather than tell me.
What if, instead of spending money on all the normal campaign activities, candidates were required to take on a project or activity to demonstrate their capacity to perform some aspect(s) of the administrative duties of President? (Think job interview – complete with a competency examination.)
The tasks could range all over the board, from social measures like reducing illiteracy to fiscal measures like creating a balanced budget plan for a specified region/governmental body. Each task would have discrete, measurable goals that you could rate the candidate's performance on, and the duration/scope of the task would be dependent on the amount of money the campaign decides to spend (with detailed accounting and auditing performed throughout the task to ensure they're not overspending). The project goals and milestones would be drawn up so that they would be challenging to complete, but not impossible. Depending on the difficulty and scope of the tasks, the candidate might have to complete multiple projects during the "campaign period", and wouldn't be able to choose more than one or two from a specific area of the candidate's expertise.
In the end, only candidates who measured up to some pre-determined minimum performance score would be allowed to run for office. The public would be able to follow the projects as they were carried out and see the candidate measured up in the end. (Wouldn't you love to see a status report of Obama's latest efforts on Good Morning America instead of a 15 second sound-byte of his latest speech in Harlem?)
This would NOT determine who became president, but rather would provide a way to weed out those inefficient/incapable candidates, while providing the public with more proof that a qualifying candidate (with his/her staff) can complete a set of measurable goals in a given time period with a given budget. Or at least, let the public see how how that candidate will behave while trying to do so.
Yes, there probably are some kinks to work out of some sort of aptitude test like this. But this type of "campaign" changes, in many ways, the existing paradigm of a successful campaign of "Who has the most money to spend on their campaign?" to "Who can do the most with their money?" And in the end, something beneficial to someone would come out of the effort.
After all, would you rather have your candidate of choice spend $100 million on TV and newspaper advertisements, or $100 million on an initiative that resulted in reducing the number of incidences of domestic abuse in the state of New York in 2007 by 23%?
