Any time you hang out in any of the big airports, you are accosted by the unending stream that is CNN. The babblenews network just loves slowly-unfolding news dramas, as multi-day events allow for the pacing and repetition of a soap opera. CNN Is kind of "As the World Turns" in non-fiction. Day 20 of our current saga is all about lawsuits and posturing around the few hundred votes in the five Florida counties that will supposedly decide the future of the free world. CNN has endless fodder as long as the shenanigans go on, and they'll even get to do year-end retrospectives about the "election crisis." The CNN story being aired right now is all about questioning the Electoral College. Maybe a constitutional amendment can abolish it, so that elections can be more streamlined and unambiguous. While the story is good filler, the consequences would be suicidal for CNN -- ambiguity and artificial complexity are what keep people watching pundits well-fed, and commentators on the lecture circuit. All this is great for the TV ratings, but this particular chain of events won't do for them what the Gulf War did. If CNN were to put out a retrospective of Election 2000, do you think anybody would buy it? This might be the most direct vote of no-confidence Americans could possible give. No, Americans don't really want to do away with the electoral college: we seem instead to be asking for the abolition of the presidency. This wouldn't involve any more constitutional surgery than converting to direct elections, and it would be a lot more satisfying. Plus, if nobody was getting elected, we'd never have to worry about presidential campaign finance reforms. You could even give the electoral college a lasting function by having it act as the head of the executive branch. Intuitively, Americans know that 538 yahoos you never heard of could do a better job running things than either Gore Junior or Bush Junior. Gone would be the sanctimony and pious speeches from the president. Gone forever, too, would be the spin doctors -- the species would die out once they discovered the impossibility of applying political twists when 500 different voices are speaking at once. Plus, you could get rid of that dumb white house web site, and permanently remove the confusion between www.whitehouse.gov and www.whitehouse.com Now I admit that this proposal has a few minor issues to be worked out. Wall Street would hate the uncertainty and let valuations fall out of the sky. To make an omelette, you have to break some eggs. There might be the occasional dictator who tried to attack us because we didn't have a testosterone-poisoned gunslinger at the helm. Picky picky picky. You could never have a State Dinner -- but which among us has ever attended, or even been invited to, one of them?