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A while back, I saw a bumper sticker that said "Don't blame me, he's not my president."  Of course, I know that there was the small possibility that the person that owned this car was a foreign national living here in Wisconsin, which would make that statement true, but I I also know that even if that were the case, it is very unlikely that that was the group of people this particular bumper sticker was targeted at.  I know perfectly well that this was an attempt at humor by someone obviously on the left side of the political spectrum regarding the 2000 presidential election.  I personally found no humor in the bumper sticker at all.  In fact, it made me furious.

Why would this make me furious?  Yes, I am a supporter of President Bush, but that has very little to do with it.  There are two things that made me angry when I saw that bumper sticker.  First of all, he most definitely is your president.  He was elected fairly by the rules set forth in the US Constitution.  Even if you disagree with those rules, you cannot argue that fact.  You also have no right to say that just because you do not like the guy or what he is or isn't doing in office.  I personally despise President Clinton and just about everything he ever did as our president, but he was, in fact, our president, and was elected in the same matter that President Bush was elected.  I am not going to disrepect him for having different beliefs than me and making decisions contrary to what I believe is the correct choice.  I disliked him, but I still respected and acknowledged the fact that he was our president and was elected as such by the people of the United States of America.

Like President Clinton, whom most of the liberals I have met adore, President Bush was elected president by the people of this great nation, and it is his right to succeed or fail based on the decisions that he makes.  It is our right, as citizens, to either agree or disagree with the decisions that the president makes, and express our those opinions how we see fit.  You may say that based on that statement, I have no reason to be angry by this bumper sticker.  This is just the way that individual has chosen to express his opinion.  However, a statement like "Don't blame me, he's not my president" is nothing more than an insulting way of saying "I don't like him, so I won't acknowledge his presidency."  More than that, this bumper sticker, and those like it, make a mockery of the electoral process (and to an extent, the entire concept of our federal government) set forth by our forefathers over two hundred years ago.  This bumper sticker is clearly in reference to the fact that President Bush did not have a majority of the popular vote in 2000, and won due to the way the electoral college works.  Many people back then were saying things like this, that he isn't really our president because he didn't win the popular vote across the nation.  Every time I heard that, I cringed.  These people clearly have no knowledge of why the process for electing our president is as it is.  A group of men who were much more intelligent about politics, governance, and democracy than most people alive today came up with our election process and I believe that their reasons are as valid today as they were back then. 

I understand that most people out there do not know the true reasons for the electoral college, and I can definitely feel for them, because I felt the same way, a long time ago.  Of course, the reason that I felt the electoral college had overstayed its welcome is because I had been taught that way back in elementary school.  I was taught that the reason for the electoral college was to prevent people from just buying all of the votes from a populous region of uneducated and lower-income people to sway an election in one direction or the other.  When I was in high school, while doing research into something unrelated, I came across another, more valid, reason, and learned that this previous reason was a complete fallacy.  The real reason that we have the electoral college for electing the president is that the United States is not a direct democracy, it is a constitutionally limited republic.  The nation was founded under the principle that the states govern themselves, and the federal government is in place to provide cohesion between the states, nothing more.  Therefore, each individual state chooses which candidate they believe should be president, and the state's votes are used in that manner.  This was done to make sure that every state would have a say in the election of the president and that each state's citizens would have a chance to be heard by the presidential hopefuls.  If we had a purely democratic presidential election, what likelihood would there be that a candidate would ever bother to visit states like Iowa or Wisconsin?  I maintain that there would be little chance of that happening, when they could win just about every election by winning a few east coast and California cities.

I may have said that I understand why people believe the electoral college should go, but that doesn't mean that I agree with it.  Ignorance is no reason to start shouting for change.  These same people would be the ones clamoring to keep the electoral college had "their guy," Al Gore, won the election with the electoral college and lost the popular vote, instead of President Bush.  And a large number of conservatives would have been making the same arguments for abolishing the electoral college, and I would find them just as ignorant and wrong.  All this shows me is that the people of this nation need to start becoming smarter and make more informed decisions before they speak or act.  You can't start arguing for changing the foundation of our nation, the Constitution, just because you don't like the guy that won our presidential election.

Now, as for the new bumper sticker that I have seen, stating "He's still not my president," even though he did win both the popular vote and the electoral vote the second time around, well, that's a discussion for another time.