Election 2016: Let’s try something different next time

OK, for the millionth time: “How in the world did we get here?”

Of course, I’m talking about the presidential election. Have you ever heard so many people say they wish the other party had a better candidate so they wouldn’t have to vote for theirs?

Or so many people agree that their candidate is a terrible and/or completely unlikeable person but they’re going to vote for him/her anyway because they’re making a choice based on “party platform” or “how they say they’ll run the government?”

Of course, there’s one problem there: Do you really believe anything either candidate says?

It feels appropriate that we’re gaining an hour this weekend. Next week, it’ll get dark faster.

Makes me think of the Billy Joel song “Goodnight Saigon” where everything was “dark, so dark at night” and everybody “prayed to Jesus Christ with all of our might.”

Cue the chorus: “And we would all go down together! We said we would all go down together! Yes we would all go down together!”

There, I feel better now.

I’m just hoping we won’t let this happen again in the future. You know, when one party has two choices — Hillary Clinton and Bernie “and you thought Obama was a socialist” Sanders. And the other party has a hundred choices but one of them is a class-clown billionaire who spends all his debate time taking potshots at everybody else.

Jeb Bush, who was thoroughly humiliated by Donald Trump, is the name I hear most often when people talk about the Republican they wish was on this ballot.

The Democrat is Joe Biden.

Biden, of course, chose not to run, proving he’s probably a pretty smart guy.

Hey, maybe we should choose our candidates based on who doesn’t want to be president.

It makes me think of the time I was nominated for a leadership position in my church. I declined, saying the jury was still out on whether I could successfully raise a family or become the kind of person they wanted.

My pastor replied that if I’d said I was fit for the job, then I wouldn’t have been fit for it, but by saying I wasn’t I was actually saying I was.

Huh? It was a nice piece of reverse psychology.

Maybe it applies to presidential candidates.

Clearly, Hillary wants to be president and believes she can do the job.

I’m not so sure Trump wants to actually do the job of president, but he’s certainly all in.

During the GOP convention, he talked about the moment when things got so dark in America that he sat down with his children and told them he’d decided to run for president and “Make America Great Again.”

He did put that slogan on a bunch of red hats — that much is true. But midway through his campaign, with his popularity soaring, Trump started saying really crazy stuff, as if to prove this was all a publicity stunt, he knew he wouldn’t win, and he was ready to move on to other things.

But the crazier the things he said got, the higher his approval ratings went.

On Tuesday, he could win the nation’s biggest popularity contest (in which the most popular doesn’t necessarily win). At the least, he’s now got 12.9 million Twitter followers.

I think about Abraham Lincoln. With all his well-documented ambition, he took a job nobody wanted and was thought by many at the time to be America’s last president.

Those were dark days. When people asked Lincoln what he was going to do in office, he didn’t say anything anybody wanted to hear. He just did what he had to do.

That was a long time ago.

This story was originally published November 4, 2016 at 3:04 PM with the headline "Election 2016: Let’s try something different next time."