Political Campaign Problems Essay, Research Paper

In political campaigns today there are problems. One of the problems with campaigns today is soft money. Another problem I believe we should address is, candidates making promises to get elected and then not keeping those promises. One final problem that should be addressed is the way the candidates go about being elected.

The first problem with campaigns today deals with campaign contributions. People can only give so much money to a candidate themselves, so they instead give money to the political party of the candidate. This money cannot go to the candidate, so the political party uses this money to pay for ads, telephone calls and other tedious items that they can pay for the supports their candidate. This type of campaign contribution is called soft money and there is legislation under way to prevent candidates from using soft money during their legislation. This problem needs to be addressed by either making soft money contributions illegal, or by saying that candidates cannot use soft money to help pay for ads, and telephone calls in their campaign.

Another problem with political campaigns is about campaign promises made by candidates. Candidates that make campaign promises need to keep them, it is all to familiar in America that candidates make campaign promises to get into office and then do not keep their promises. This is a common practice in politics and people are used to it and that is a problem, when a candidate promises to lower taxes, cut federal spending, or anything else and when they don t they should be held accountable. They need to only make promises they can keep, because some official can make all of these campaign promises that sound really good but they have no intention of following through. By doing this some candidates are basically lying to get into office. To get rid of these problems we need to instate some kind of law that makes elected officials who don t follow through with their campaign promises not able to seek a second term, or another first term in any other political office from something as lowly as a county position to the presidency.

The last campaign problem deals with how elected officials go about getting elected. In the recent race for mayor of Los Angeles one candidate Jim Hahn, and a fellow candidate Antonio Villaraigosa had slander campaigns against one another. They had people calling homes, and they had television commercials in which they did not address any political party, the commercials basically said what each candidate had done wrong, and who supported each candidate. By doing this the public ends up voting based on the persons character and not his political views. This type of politics is all too common in America, and something needs to be done about this. There is several ways to help curb this type of slander against fellow candidates. One way this can be stopped is by making any type of slanderous or non-relevant comments about a fellow candidate illegal. If you violate this law we can do two things, one we can make you retract your statement or commercial publicly and you are fined, or we can make you publicly retract your statement or commercial publicly and you are forced to resign from the campaign.

Political campaigns in America should not be about who has the most money, who makes the best promises, or who has the best character. Political campaigns should be about who is best for the job regardless of how much money you can put in a campaign, or about lies that get you into office, or about what mistakes you have made in the pass. If u base elections on these you will never get a good person for the position you are trying to fill.