The question mark over the American political system is this: whether those women and men who best understand the crises of the times and the directions that are needed in American and world policy could even remotely hope to be elected President, Congresspersons, mayors, or to any other public office. This question has several layers. First, we have seen that popular elective offices have become so captive to the financial power of great corporations that critical and independent thinkers are almost automatically excluded. We come almost full circle in democracy to preferring those with inherited wealth and leadership tradition as the least corruptible, since at least they and their “interests” coincide. The efforts to create reforms that would publicly finance political campaigns produce such contradictions that we have the spectacle of Eugene McCarthy and James Buckley teaming up against them on the grounds that they would underwrite only the incumbents.