On Tuesday, vote Barack Obama. It looks like McCain will get the GOP nomination and if so, for the first time in my life, my primary issue, Campaign Finance/Ethics/Lobby Reform will be taken off the table of contention between the two major candidates for President.

Hillary, I fear, says the things she has to say about ethics, but is not driven to clean up the system. The problem with our government is that legislation is written by lobbyists and concentrated interest control which laws are executed and which are ignored. For a Democratic Republic to exist not just in the "meta", the power must come from and be suited to the people's mass interests within agreed framework of the Constitution and arguments therein about the parameters of that framework should be settled by the courts.

Legislators, using their staffs, need to write legislation. The choices about which issues take priority with regard to executing the law need to be made in an environment free of concentrated interests.

The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't need Chevron to write the laws and former employees of Shell to execute them. The EPA needs scientists and employees who seek to protect the environment. As it stands now, we are government by corporate lobbyist. People who go into politics to get rich, need to fuck off.

There are many devices and solutions to re-instating small "d" democratic ethical values back into the system. We need a President who seeks to push a strong reform agenda, not just a candidate who'll pay lip service to the ideas, and give up when the push back comes.

Barack Obama should have the political capital necessary to clean up how laws are made and executed, so that subsequently quality legislation can be created and implemented. McCain shares this goal, this goal of a political system where money isn't the primary pre-occupation of lawmakers, a system devoid of revolving doors from public service to corporate service and back again. Having two candidates who agree in principle, one a Democrat and one a Republican, will be an amazing and important achievement.

Campaign Finance is not a panacea. It is time to try something totally different, we could always return to our current plutocratic malaise, but we really should stop calling ourselves a democracy when the consent of the people never reaches the heights necessary to be acclaimed as "democratic".