Willow:

The Dems should clearly make a move to win some – any – trust from the voters. To put things in perspective, if you think George W isn’t doing well, his approval ratings dwarf the Dem controlled congress. The best way they can do this is to stand for something. Thus far, they’ve failed to do this. No one elects an angry candidate and the Dems seem solely focused on running against the incumbent president, who is someone I can say with certainty is not running in the up-coming election.

To your points:

Talk real, more naturally: apparently, our current crop of candidates has decided that slapstick is the only way to achieve breakthrough and are turning towards being “funny” as their platform of choice. Not the best way to win hearts and minds when you’re running for a fundamentally serious job.

Self regulate: self-regulate what, exactly? That there will be no negative ads? Negative ads work. Especially when they expose the truth about a candidate’s lack of judgment, character or leadership. Knowing that John Kerry got a purple heart for an injury that required a band aid (literally) took a lot of the gloss off of a fake war record. Good to know.

Slash paid advertising: you know, this is more about awareness than changing minds. Let’s look at another great every-four-year event, the Olympics. The top 11 sponsors paid a total of $886 million in ad spending for Turin plus Beijing. I’d argue that being elected the leader of the free world is more important than selling Big Macs. Few of the candidates will be spending what Toyota spends on supporting its Camry mid-sized car. Communicating less probably isn’t what is needed: we need them to communicate more. They need to answer questions both on and off line, in front of cameras and in front of keyboards. We need to know how they react under pressure. This is an important job.

Enlist citizen journalists: I think they already have, for better or worse. You can’t pick which ones will like you and you can’t stop them from hating you.

Invite constituents to join them on the road: they can if they like, and probably do already.

Divert saved dollars to the winner so they can launch a major program: if I’m a donor, I don’t want to support some other guy’s program. If I want to support a program, unfortunately I can’t. Dennis Miller recently discussed the idea of launching a War Bond, where citizens could buy bonds to be used exclusively to fund the war on terror; unfortunately, it isn’t possible to do this kind of thing.

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Here’s a few absolutely impossible wishes for campaign reform that I’d put on my list:

Experienced candidates only: each must have been the governor of a state (political P&L management), served in congress for more than two terms (political survivability and knowledge of the process), and served as an ambassador (foreign policy). This is not a job for a rookie. You aspire to this kind of job. You don’t start here. Understand that your competition in most of the world got to where they are because they killed a lot of their enemies.

Each voter must explain why they are voting for their candidate: this stops the nicest looking fellow from being elected. If you can’t say why you think John Edwards would be a good president of the US, you can’t vote for him. And things like, “but he played sax on SNL” won’t cut it.

Where’s the beef: each candidate should be required to answer the same 99 questions as selected by popular vote AND a panel of pundits. And there should be case study questions. Hey, quick: Putin decides he’s got enough political capital to march into Czechoslovakia – what do you do in the first 24 hours, 1 week, 1 month, and 6 months? Have members of the military, foreign service and private sector judge the answers over a period of hours. No sound bytes. Those candidates who don’t make the cut are eliminated from the election. Just vote them off the island. Kick them out of the presidential cash cab. On the spot.

I could go on, but it would chew up the rest of my day.

Not that this isn’t fun, though.

Regards.