HOW OUR DEMOCRACY MAKES SAUSAGE: HAS OUR GOVERNMENT KEPT PACE WITH ADVANCES

Otto von Bismarck, the 19th century chancellor of Germany, is reported to have said there are two things one should never watch being made: sausages and laws. Finding ourselves in the midst of what has increasingly become an almost continuous exercise in extracting votes from the American electorate, one is tempted to add a third event one should avoid watching: political campaigns.

Indeed, there is evidence that we Americans are paying even less attention to campaigns than we accord the manufacture of sausage or the creation of our local, state and federal laws. Although more than eight months remain before we can end the first presidential election in this century, it already seems to have become a significant part of our lives for months and months. It may not be much longer before we make these electoral joustings a part of our daily lives, not dissimilar to the nightly summary of the day's stock market or the report on what kind of weather we can expect when we awaken the next day.

To an extent that astonishes anyone who is not an American, our nation today is really about the holding of elections. We do not merely have elections on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November in every year divisible by four. We also have elections on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in every year divisible by two. In addition, five states have elections in odd-numbered years. We would do well to remember this fact: There is no year in the United States ever when a major statewide election is not being held somewhere. To this catalog of general elections has, of course, to be added an equally long catalogue of primary elections, a plebiscite that will be held in our own state next month when we join the list of 43 presidential primary states.

Moreover, not only do elections occur very frequently in the U.S. but the number of jobs required to be filled by them is enormous from the presidency to the post of local consumer advocate in New York to the office of township clerk in more than 20 percent of Missouri's counties. It has been estimated that no fewer than 500,000 elective offices are filled or waiting to be filled in the United States this very moment.

Americans take the existence of their never-ending election campaign for granted. Some like it, some dislike it, and most are simply bored by it, expressing their great relief that a national campaign is over when, in fact, another one is silently and anonymously beginning. Like it or hate it, we are all conscious of it, in the same way that we are conscious of McDonald's, "The Tonight Show," Oprah, Koppel, the St. Louis Rams and all the other symbols and institutions that make up the richly diverse tapestry of American life.

To a visitor to our shores, however, the never-ending campaign presents a largely unfamiliar spectacle. In other countries election campaigns have both beginnings and ends, and there are even periods, often prolonged periods, when no campaigns take place at all. Other features of our elections are also unfamiliar: in no civilized or uncivilized country in our universe do elections and campaigns cost as much as they do in the U.S. Indeed, the total cost of this year's U.S. presidential campaigns, including the preliminary primary elections, is expected to exceed the gross national product of 84 percent of the world's economies.

America's permanent election campaign, together with other aspects of American electoral politics, has one crucial consequence, little noticed but vitally important to the functioning of American democracy. Quite simply, the U.S. electoral system places politicians in a highly vulnerable position. Individually and collectively they are more vulnerable, more of the time, to the vicissitudes of electoral politicians than are the politicians of any other democratic country. Because they are more vulnerable, they devote more of their time electioneering, and their conduct in office is more continuously governed by electoral considerations.

It can easily be argued that American politicians' constant and unremitting electoral preoccupations have harmful, pejorative consequences for the functioning of the American system of self-government. These preoccupations consume time and scarce resources. Worse, they make it more difficult than it would otherwise be for the system as a whole to deal with some of the nation's most pressing problems.

Many Americans often complain that their system is not sufficiently democratic. It can be argued that, on the contrary, there is a sense in which the system has become too democratic and ought to be made less so. For example, the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the 163 members of the Missouri House must stand for election every two years, a term laid out by our founding fathers as one assuring greater democratic representation of all citizens who were then allowed to vote: white, mostly land-owning male citizens. Just think how our society has changed since those term limits were written, and equally important, realize this restriction requires hundreds of men and women to campaign not just two or three months every other year but every day, week and fortnight during their 24-month terms. One can only wonder how these representatives have any time to consider the affairs of state, much less remain connected intellectually with their constituents.

We Americans like to boast about our vast technological advances, our role in creating and developing the so-called Information Age, as well as our fast-forwarded economy that is the envy of the rest of the world. How many of us boast that our system of government has kept pace with these advancements, or observed any noticeable improvement in the constitutional process of our founders, or have separated the manufacture of sausage from the make of laws?

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.