Trego's Mountain Ear

So I’m looking at a poll of popularity among politicians.  The poll even includes Elon Musk – who is not a presidential candidate, not eligible to run for the presidency (born in Africa, you know) and has 14% more favorable ratings than unfavorable.

DeSantis has 8% more favorable ratings than unfavorable, as does Nikki Haley.  Tim Scott and Vivek Ramiswami check in with 7%.

The high scoring Democrat is Bernie Sanders, with 1%.  Trump’s at -1%, and Biden at -10%.

The message – emphasis on the mess syllable – is that Americans view our political leadership unfavorably more often than favorably.  That evidence may be a statement on the quality of our leaders, or it may be a statement about the quality of our electors.  Or, I can simply embrace the power of inclusion, and assume that we have an intensely divided electorate led by political figures we all find unacceptable. 

With a change in advertising emphasis, and no change in taste, Bud Light went from top selling brand to the bottom almost overnight – the folks who made the decisions on beer advertising definitely lacked an understanding of beer drinkers. 

I’m enjoying an improvement for gardening – an earlier Spring, with less frosts – yet I listen to “Climate Change” pronouncements that treat a longer growing season here at the 49th parallel as if it is a bad thing.  Not all change is bad – and the longer growing season and short-season crop variants are a good thing for gardens in my area.

If I recall correctly, Richard Nixon won the presidency with 61% of the vote in 1972 – and resigned before the end of that term.  Lyndon Johnson was at 61.1% in 1965 – and the comments I recall suggest his favorability rating was Bidenesques by the time I entered college.  In other words, electing politicians who have high unfavorable ratings isn’t a new thing – it’s just being measured now.

In ancient Athens,

“In the 1960s, archaeologists made a remarkable discovery in the history of elections: they found a heap of about 8,500 ballots, likely from a vote tallied in 471 B.C., in a landfill in Athens. These intentionally broken pieces of pottery were the ancient equivalent of scraps of paper, but rather than being used to usher someone into office, they were used to give fellow citizens the boot. Called ostraca, each shard was scrawled with the name of a candidate the voter wanted to see exiled from the city for the next 10 years.

From about 487 to 416 B.C., ostracism was a process by which Athenian citizens could banish someone without a trial. “It was a negative popularity contest,” says historian James Sickinger of Florida State University. “We’re told it originated as a way to get rid of potential tyrants. From early times, it seems to be used against individuals who were maybe not guilty of a criminal offense, so [a case] couldn’t be brought to court, but who had in some other way violated or transgressed against community norms and posed a threat to civic order.” Athenians would first take a vote on whether there should be an ostracophoria, or an election to ostracize. If yes, then they would set a date for the event. A candidate had to have at least 6,000 votes cast against him to be ostracized and historical records suggest that this occurred at least a dozen times.”

Now just might be a time to bring this idea back.  Since nobody in Congress reads the 5,000 page laws that they cavalierly pass, all we need to do is recruit a single congressional staffer to slide in a couple of pages that re-institute the ostracophoria, but basing it on polling scores and making it automatic.  Once the new ostracophoria passes, and we just take it to an agreeable court to get it enforced – New York would have a court that would exile Trump, and my guess is that I could find a judge in Wyoming to exile Biden.  Those old greeks might have been on to something.