Poll Shows voters want free ads for candidates and fixed money from Government.

::::::::

Ask a political person about how to judge a candidate's viability, electability and potential and often, very often, the first criteria they use is the ability to raise money. That means the willingness to sit for four, six, eight hours a day, in a room, making phone calls asking for money.

This is probably the number one criteria most beltway politicians judge candidates to be good or not.

Let's take this a bit further. What do they use the money they raise for? The number one cost of a campaign is TV advertising. It can suck up millions of dollars.

So, what we have is a bizarre, obscene reality-- the number one criteria for a candidate for public office is his or her ability to buy TV advertising. This is not bizarre. It is insane. But it's the exact model that the DCCC, it's head Rahm Emanuel and the leaders of the both parties in Washington embrace. One problem. It's not what the majority of Americans want.

The OpEdNews/Zogby poll we took a few weeks ago found that a majority of the public wants the money taken out of politics. They want qualified candidates to receive a fixed amount of money from the government.

Even more interesting, and this is a finding you'll never see a TV Network sponsored poll ask is that a majority, 65% of voters, support requiring TV and radio shows to provide FREE air time to candidates in elections. (See question 21 of our poll. All cross-tabs are here.

Put those two together-- fixed funding for candidates and free air time and that takes the air out of the fund raising criteria for evaluating a candidate. And it should raising money is the job of an investor, not a representative of the people-- a legislator whose job it is to look out for the best interests of constituents.

Take the fund raising out of politics and you make it so much cleaner, so much more free from influence buying and peddling. This is not optional. It is something we must do to rescue politics from the dangerous downward cycle of corruption it has been spiralling into.

Take the money factor out of politics and what criteria do you have left? Ability to capture the trust of the voter? Ability to sell the candidate's self on the basis of character, integrity, likeability, vision, wisdom, resourcefulness. These are good things. Ability to build a grassroots team, ability to bring people together in support of the campaign. These are the signs of leadership that make a good candidate.

87% of Democrats support the idea that all eligible candidates should get a fixed amount of money to spend on their campaigns to prevent influence buying. 41% of Republicans and 70% of independents also support this. A majority of every religious category supports this, except born agains, and even among this most conservative base, it is supported by 47% to 42% that support unlimited money from all sources. Even NASCAR fans, military families, investors and people in every income bracket are more suppportive of it than opposed to it.

The support for free ad time for qualified candidates to local and national media is even stronger among Republicans and just as strong among Democrats and even 62% of born-agains and libertarians support the idea. And why not. The media get their free license from the people. Why shouldn't that license come with a requirement that the people get to use the airtime to help enable honest elections?

Considering the voting public's low opinion of the media, with less 2% considering it excellent and only 13% considering it good or excellent, it is no wonder that the public feels the media should give up ad time for the price of democracy.

What would happen if strict campaign laws required that candidates only spent a set amount of money, that they would get free access to TV and radio ad time? There would also have to be laws regulating third party ads-- like swift boat ad sponsors run. But most important, people would not judge a candidate by the money he got from PACs, business, wealthy people and who knows where else. Candidates would be judged for more substantive reasons. The people of the US deserve this.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation