A Modest Proposal: End This Elite Campaign!

With the price of oil and gasoline reaching new highs every week, regular Americans are combining shopping trips, canceling vacations, trading in SUVs and even riding buses with the really poor people.

Meanwhile, the elitist presidential candidates are jetting around the country like Donald Trump or Paris Hilton or whatever famous billionaire you've seen in a teevee show.

It is time to stop this elite waste of precious fuel and money. It is time for the candidates to renounce this terrible campaigning from state to state. It is time for a return to America's proudest moment of democracy, the successful "front porch campaigns" of the greatest presidents in our nation's great history: William McKinley, James Garfield and Warren G. Harding.

How does a Front Porch Campaign work? Simple: Instead of barnstorming the country, the candidate stays home. If the media is interested in covering the candidate, reporters and camera crews are sent to the candidate's hometown, where they camp out in those horrible satellite trucks and media buses.

As John McCain surely recalls, Warren Harding was a good looking business insider with a media-savvy wife. Even though he was all but unknown to Americans, had several mistresses, was a boozer during Prohibition and was rumored to be an octoroon, Harding won because of his Front Porch Campaign in 1920 -- the first presidential election to be covered by radio and newsreels. But when Harding went on a cross-country "listening tour" in 1923, he mysteriously dropped dead.

Just 24 years before Harding's victory, when John McCain was in high school, there was the famous 1896 Front Porch Campaign by Ohio Governor William McKinley, who won the White House without leaving his own house. McKinley was assassinated in 1901.

McCain was only a boy when James Garfield pioneered the Front Porch Campaign during the 1880 election. From his home in Mentor, Ohio, the Civil War general spoke to supporters and the press. He was elected and then killed a few months later, by an assassin.

Will Barack Obama, John McCain and (if she's still running) Hillary Clinton follow the bold example of these presidential titans?

In this age of obesity and watching teevee all the time, very few Americans will venture out to see candidates make personal appearances. Let the campaigning happen exclusively on television, where it belongs. This is America, after all.

The best part about a Front Porch Campaign is that the fanatic supporters of a candidate will also go camp out near the "front porch." Some 600,000 Harding supporters visited his hometown of Marion, Ohio, during the 1920 campaign. Imagine if all the old ladies who love Hillary went to wherever she lives (Scranton?) and stayed there until November. Better yet, imagine if Ron Paul's wacky followers all moved to Ron Paul's front yard in Texas, and stayed there forever!

As for the hundreds of millions of dollars held by the campaigns -- okay, "held by Obama's campaign" -- let's give that money to America's poor children. Let's make a real difference in 2008. Help the poor children!

Ken Layne is the editor of Wonkette.