editor’s note: this is the second of two pieces that deal with the media’s misplacement of focus within issues of critical import. The first piece can be found here.

These past few days I’ve read a number of expected and predictable pieces about the Electoral College. I’ve also read a number of pieces on the notion of two Americas.

I didn’t read anything that made a connection between the College and the rupture.

The Electoral College is what keeps Sarah Palin from coming to NYC for anything but a Saturday Night Live appearance. If New Yorkers and Californians aren’t in play for her, and she comes from the relatively isolated and insulated background that she does, it makes it easy for her to see the citizens of these and other deep blue states as two dimensional, unpatriotic Americans.

And if Barack Obama doesn’t have reason to go to blood red states because there’s nothing to be gained in his election bid, how are the people there supposed to see him as anything but an alien, discomforting being? And how is he going to absorb the feelings and orientations of people with whom he truly doesn’t, at present, have much in common with?

I just received an e-mail from the Obama campaign urging me to “Help Barack Win Battleground States”. I’m sure I’ll be getting something similar from the McCain campaign shortly.

States shouldn’t be battlegrounds. That only further polarizes an already divided nation.

The founding fathers created a provision for flexibility in the face of changing circumstances. It’s called a constitutional amendment. Most of the calls for abolishing the Electoral College have to do with giving every individual the right to make a difference in the presidential election.

This call is motivated by the desire to begin to close the chasm that’s been widening over the last 8 years.

The Electoral College, once a protector of state’s rights, now threatens the existence of the nation it helped midwife. It’s having the increasingly insidious effect of pitting brother against brother.

                          

The tax system is broken. The way that taxes are assessed discourages innovation, and the way that the monies are re-allocated by both elected and unelected officials encourages patronage and waste. If this government were a business, it would be in chapter 11 proceedings and its employees would have been fired, or indicted. It’s only through accounting smoke and mirrors that we appear solvent.

The massive costs we incur to educate, feed, and maintain the health of the illegal population are crippling our ability to educated, feed, and maintain the health of the legal population, leaving us unable to build up the strength required to help others in need, like, for example, the illegal population.

The procedure for declaring and going to war has gotten so fuzzy that the president can act as a monarch, and legislators trade a vote in favor of warfare for an earmark to construct bridges to nowhere. Now that’s mass murder.

The electoral college has rendered campaigning in more than half the states in the union unproductive. One man one vote is a thing of the past where presidential elections are concerned.

The American dream is clearly becoming harder, and in fact, nearly impossible to achieve. Without adequate early education, kids on the bottom rung of the ladder won’t be qualified to take advantage of the new, laudable trend of the free tuition now being offered to them by top institutions of higher learning.

Before underprivileged and frustrated folks of all races and creeds decide to head for the posh parts of town carrying machetes and shotguns, men and woman of sound mind and good will have to get this nation’s act together.