Jeri Ryan got Barack Obama elected

The entire politisphere is agog over the fact that everybody who isn’t a politician is leading in the polls right now. That would be true of Democrats too, but none of the Democrat candidates isn’t a politician. It does explain why Bernie, who has been on the outside looking in for decades, has been boosted to near the top and sometimes at the top, in spite of his professed socialism.

People are deeply unhappy with career politicians. And there is a good reason. All … well … nearly all politicians are as corrupt as yogurt left out on a hot day. You can depend on it. It’s a fact of the American method of governance. The “Gravel Pit Theory” is my own invention to explain why politicians are so corrupt.

… nearly all politicians are as corrupt as yogurt left out on a hot day.

By “politician,” I mean someone who has been able to win, say, three or four elections above the municipal level and move up to progressively higher office. By “corrupt,” I mean that they have compromised any public values they might have had to the point that they really don’t have any values at all other than a desire to win the next election.

Here’s the “Gravel Pit Theory.” An election is like a screen in a gravel pit. Dirt and rocks are dumped on the screen and the rocks that are smaller than the holes in the screen go through. So if you take a bucket of screened half-inch gravel, you can be assured that nearly all of the rocks are smaller than a half-inch. There are very rare exceptions. There might be a hole in the screen. A bigger rock might roll down a hill and end up in the pile.

To win more than three or four elections, you have to make deals. You have to get money. And then you have to change your position to match what people with money want.

There are lots of ex-politicians who have great public values. That’s the main reason they’re ex-politicians. They were the “wrong size” to go through the holes in the screen. (Personally, I don’t think I could get elected as dog catcher, but I did hold an appointed public office once. The mayor threw me out over a disagreement in which I refused to see things the mayor’s way.)

This brings us to why Jeri Ryan is responsible for Barack Obama being president.

How Jeri Ryan got Barack Obama Elected

Illinois Republican Jack Ryan was accused by his former wife, actress Jeri Ryan, of pressuring her to have sex at swinger’s clubs in New York, Paris, and New Orleans while other patrons watched … with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.

If you don’t remember Jeri Ryan (and males over a certain age should have a hard time forgetting her), she is an actress who has real acting talent but much, much better physical attributes. I remember her from the series “Star Trek Voyager” wherein she played the role of “Seven of Nine” and wore a skintight body stocking that … well … if she got a mosquito bite, it would show. Other than that, I can’t really remember what the show was about.

She was born Jeri Lynn Zimmermann. She became Jeri Ryan when she married Jack Ryan, a very well connected, rich, good looking, and intelligent candidate for the Senate seat from Illinois. Ryan seemed to be a “lock” for the election. Obama had just emerged from a bruising primary involving fifteen candidates. It was the most expensive U.S. Senate primary in history to that date. Previous to this Senate contest, Obama had only been elected to the Illinois legislature once.

It turned out that Jack Ryan was more than just rich, good-looking, and politically connected. He also had interesting personal habits. Jeri Ryan had divorced him because (quoting a tabloid at the time), “Illinois Republican Jack Ryan was accused by his former wife, actress Jeri Ryan, of pressuring her to have sex at swinger’s clubs in New York, Paris, and New Orleans while other patrons watched … with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.” A couple of news outlets got the divorce records unsealed just in time to be a page one scandal before the election. Ryan formally withdrew from the race less than a week later, just three months before the general election.

In desperation, Republicans cast around for someone else to run. They found a Maryland-based radio show personality named Allan Keyes who only established residency in Illinois days before becoming the Republican candidate and who had run six earlier fringe campaigns for public office. Obama creamed him. This gave him a springboard to show off his other talents that he simply would not have had otherwise. He was elected president before he had completed his first term in the Senate.

So, in a very real sense, Barack Obama is an “accidental president” elected by an unlikely sequence of events. He was kicked into the gravel pile – he didn’t have to go through the screen – and his personal and moral compass was still intact when he reached that office. It’s one of the big reasons that he was elected ­by voters who increasingly distrust politicians. Especially in the first election, we could tell that Obama was a rookie and we liked that.

This doesn’t mean that every inexperienced person should be elected. When we elect someone with no previous public experience, we’re taking a big chance. Sometimes you get Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not everybody liked him, but he did as good a job as the professional politicians and was elected to a second term. Sometimes you get Jesse Ventura or Sarah Palin who were simply embarrassments. Electing people with no track record is a very risky game.

Electing professional politicians isn’t always a bad thing. The people with money are just trying to get what they want done, and sometimes that’s also good for America. But it always means that the essential function of democracy … representing all of the people … is perverted beyond all recognition. Professional politicians represent the people who elected them and can get them elected again. (In an interview here in southern Utah, a local politician told me very directly, “Your readers don’t elect me so I don’t care what they think.” That’s corruption.)

There is a theory in America that we can solve this problem by kicking the corrupt bums out. It won’t work. New corrupt bums will just take the place of the old corrupt bums. It’s the process that has to be fixed.

The only way I can think of to fix the process is to cut off the source of corruption … the money. Being elected over and over doesn’t make a politician corrupt. Being forced to sacrifice values to get elected over and over does.

It will have to be drastic surgery. Spending our tax dollars to replace all the money—the current plan—is unnecessary and wasteful. Instead, why not make it basically illegal for a human being to contribute more money to a politician than, say, one day’s salary at the minimum wage in any one election? Currently, that would put the limit at $58 for a federal election. That would apply to all sources. Organizations should be barred from contributing any money at all. Neither union nor a bank could finance their electoral choice.

And think of the side benefits! Campaigns would be poverty stricken compared to the millions upon millions they spend today! We wouldn’t have to endure political attack ads for months and months. We wouldn’t have to look at tacky cardboard signs at road intersections. And candidates might have to run on their accomplishments and platform rather than with an ad campaign.