How America elects ‘Idols’: Is this any way to run a country?

A clipping from Time magazine’s “Milestones” section has been sitting on my desk for a few days, its contents so strange and disheartening that I have avoided looking at it after a first glance. It says essentially that we are more involved with entertainment than we are with the democratic process.

“The right to vote,” a phrase with stirring content, has been bass-drummed about since the process was instituted some 200-plus years ago and expanded a bit after that. Most recently, it was shown that the people do indeed cherish that right. They cast an amazing 64 million votes to select the new winner of “American Idol.”

What struck me about it in the short clip offered by Time was that the number of votes cast to declare Taylor Hicks the winner was more than those cast for any president of the United States, ever. Although that number reflects multiple votes, not actual voters, and is an overall total, it’s still an impressive figure.

A 29-year-old singer from Alabama, Hicks and the other remaining finalist, Katharine McPhee, beat the record cast for Ronald Reagan in 1984 by about 10 million votes. The reality of the short piece was so staggering that it sent me out to the gazebo to stare at a photograph of Hicks that accompanied the article and to ponder the significance of his win. He has one arm outstretched in the familiar pose of a balladeer, while the other hand clutches a microphone as though it were a holy scepter.

I don’t watch the show, but I’m willing to accept that he is probably a talented man and well deserving of whatever fame and money he might amass. Unlike, say, Paris Hilton, he has a commodity to sell beyond a willingness to simply exist. He sings.

What sent me scurrying to the gazebo was the very notion that we are more willing, perhaps even more eager, to vote for an amateur-hour contestant than we are for someone destined to lead the free world, perhaps in its final inglorious hours. George W. Bush, who was beaten by Al Gore but won anyhow, had about 14 million fewer votes than Hicks and McPhee, perhaps deservedly so.

As I sat thinking about this at the end of a perfectly glorious day, watching the late afternoon settle into an evening as sweet as heaven, I decided there were two factors involved in the difference between voting for an entertainer and voting for a politician.

In the first place, the show’s producers made it easy to vote. All a viewer had to do was pick up the telephone and dial a number. This, of course, is considerably less taxing than getting to a polling place, standing in line, signing your name, secreting yourself in a booth, punching in votes and then reversing your way home to collapse on the couch, exhausted from the harsh demands of the procedure.

If all we had to do to elect a president was pick up the cordless phone on a coffee table next to a couch where we were flaked out, a future president of the United States might well amass as many votes as Hicks and McPhee -- assuming the candidate has the kind of talent that appeals to those who watch entertainment shows. That would be factor No. 2.

Although some successful presidential candidates have demonstrated flashes of that ability -- Bill Clinton with his saxophone, Reagan with his stand-up -- most have relied on their capacity to dodge, dip, sway, slip and double-talk to win the confidence and respect of America’s voters. They come across as the political equivalent of comic Professor Irwin Corey, “the world’s foremost authority,” when it comes to knowing it all and replying in blabber to any question they are otherwise unable to handle. We in turn give them a standing ovation and send them off to the White House.

Since showbiz seems to have permeated all facets of public life, why not politics, a trade that has given us the old song and dance for so many years anyhow?

I see a show fashioned after “American Idol” (“American Idle”? “American Vital”? “American Sidle”?) in which each candidate will be asked to frame his qualifications in his or her most entertaining manner, subject to the opinions of a panel of judges who will declare who goes to the finals. Sort of a pre-Electoral College situation.

Melding today’s politics with an increasing interest in pastimes that amuse rather than inform, a candidate would be forced to please an audience not by what he says, which is useless anyhow, but by how well he can hold its attention and then win the approval of someone like the acerbic Simon Cowell, who likes no one very much.

Essential to each performance would be its appeal to the show’s target audience of screaming teens and culturally deprived adults whose emotional bells are rung only by someone who performs within their range of understanding. Those candidates who insist on simply trying to inform or who stand on their record or who seek to prove a point, silly them, would be quickly eliminated. Left standing would be the next president of the United States, a person with absolutely no leadership qualifications, very little intellectual ability and practically zero understanding of international politics.

But, boy, could he tap dance around the issues.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@ latimes.com.