I want to know three things about a presidential candidate:
1. Who is going to advise you (including your vice president)?
2. What is your proposed budget?
3. Who would you nominate to the Supreme Court?
The current model of president picking is a lot like buying insurance. An insurance company will only give you details about what is covered in the policy AFTER you buy it. WTF?
Presidential campaigns are like that. Why do I have to wait until AFTER a candidate is nominated to find out what sort of goober he or she would pick as a running mate? Why do I have to wait until AFTER the president is elected to find out that the only way to pay for all of the campaign promises is to eliminate education? Why do I have to wait to find out who is in the cabinet, or who would be nominated to the Supreme Court?
I realize all of these choices need to be carefully vetted. I can live with some imperfection in the system if, for example, a proposed cabinet member turns down the job, or has a skeleton in the closet. But knowing the proposed choices would tell me a lot more than I know now.
As I said in an earlier post, any candidate who supports corn ethanol is unqualified to lead the country. By that standard, we don’t have any qualified candidates for president. But the bar should be higher than that. If we don’t know who will advise them, how they plan to pay the bills, and who they would nominate for the Supreme Court, they haven’t given us the minimum information needed to support them.