Gov. Cox recently spoke with Ezra Klein:
And this is the problem. We believe in just short term: If I could just this once win this election, then all of my wildest dreams will come true, and my enemies will go away forever. Or: If we win this presidential election, then I’ll never have to deal with those damn people ever again. And that’s not what the Constitution envisioned. It envisioned that you will always have to deal with those “damn people,” that this is a lifetime of work. It is not a single event.
If I could, just as an aside, because I think this is really important: One of the big mistakes that we have made over the last 250 years with our country is losing the concept of federalism so much. One of the brilliant things that they did that was unique: There had been checks and balances in government in other places, but having two sovereigns at the same time was really important. And here is why: because they didn’t want our national election — our presidential election — to be that important. They really didn’t.
That’s why they gave the federal government a very distinct set of powers. The rest of that was left to the states. They knew that Texas was going to be very different from New Hampshire — or, I guess we’re going back a little bit, so maybe I should say: Virginia was very different than New York. They understood that those local differences were important.
What we’ve done by giving the federal government so much power and taking that away from the states is we’ve upped the stakes of these presidential elections to such a fever pitch that it feels like life or death — and in fact, those are the very terms that we kind of use in our politics, which is so dangerous.