The Senate is generally considered more responsible for what it is worth.
Yes, they are. I'm not saying directly elected politicans are incapable of acting responsibly.
And how would he be? A city of a million people anywhere would be just as important as said city anywhere else. The President would be beholden to cities more than rural areas. That makes sense considering that's where 90% or so of our population is.
That only makes sense if the amount of "beholding" is proportional to the population. But if the President is more than 90% beholden to the urban population, then it doesn't make sense. And one reason it might work out disproportionately is because it's cheaper on a per-voter basis to buy ad space in places with high densities of people. generatign ads targeted to and then buying ad space for voters in Chicago (2.7 MM people) is cheaper on a per-voter basis than buying ad space in both Dakotas and Montana (2.5 MM). And thus people will tend to concentrate their campaigns in Chicago more than in the Dakotas and Montana. And that will also skew candidate selection.
I'd advocate public financing of all elections to avoid undue influence and the current things that waste time.
I think public financing would we a different topic, and one I suspect on which we do not differ.
But certainly, things were better 60-some years ago. Social Security, Medicare, and things like that could never be passed today.
Social Security was passed in 1935, during the Great Depression. Medicare was an offshoot of that bill passed in 1965 in the middle of the Viet Nam War. I don't think that constitutes things being "better". Prior to the Depression, there was no consensus on government programs. It was the Depression that made us so desperate as to try anything. LBJ used national mourning after JFK's assassination to help push through his agenda and in that sense the political tactics he used are no different than the tactics W used to push through the Patriot Act.
We may laud the results of LBJ's tactics and decry the results of W's tactics, but the means used to get those passed are not much different.
Why would you go after "regions of votes", absent the electoral college?
Because the marginal cost of seeking an additional rural voter is much greater than the marginal cost of seeking an additional urban voter because urban voters -- being urban -- are concentrated nicely in populous media markets.
Here is a map of population density. I'd like one with even more granularity as the largest category is still the 250 persons/sq. mi. to 66,995 person/sq. mi. At any rate, you can hit the vast majority of Americans with political campaigns by specializing in a very small range of media markets centering around a dozen locations:the Northeast Corridor (DC-Philly-New York-Boston), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Buffalo, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Northern Ohio, Chicago, Miami, and Orlando. With the electoral college, at least some effort is made in other regions. (That's a 2000 map; by 2020, Much of the Northern Ohio population may be replaced by a larger Florida and Dallas market, and Denver and Fayetteville NC.)
