Constable: If only elections were like March Madness

Today's news is dominated by more madness spewing from our political pipeline and the welcome distraction of the NCAA basketball tournament's March Madness.

So it seems perfectly normal to reach out to my old column friend Ed Gombos of Addison.

I first wrote about Gombos in a 1991 column headlined "Hey, we could do worse than President Gombos" because the T-shirt maker was a registered candidate for president of the United States in 1996, passionate about being a good person and carried around a closet door in which he saw the image of Jesus Christ in the wood grain. I thought the image looked a bit more like the Cowardly Lion from the "Wizard of Oz," but I liked the guy and was intrigued by his political ideas, which included adopting a maximum wage to counter our minimum wage, establishing an "Advanced Thinking Center" in each community and setting up an NCAA-type tournament to elect our president.

"I don't think it's such a crazy idea," Gombos said in 1991 and again during our chat yesterday when I brought up his presidential tourney idea.

One of the advantages the NCAA tourney has over our political process is that it generates interest in people - even those who can't find Gonzaga on a map (Spokane, Washington) or know the nickname of the West Virginia team (Mountaineers) that Gonzaga plays tonight.

According to the American Gaming Association, Americans fill out 70 million brackets. That's more brackets than votes gotten by Donald Trump (or even Hillary Clinton) in the last election. Americans also are more willing to spend money on the NCAA tourney. While Clinton's seemingly endless campaign raised $1.2 billion in contributions, the NCAA tourney raked in $10.4 billion this month. And, unlike political primaries, the early rounds of the NCAA tournament are very proficient at knocking out the obviously unqualified candidates.

Reaching into his extensive filing system, which includes his 100,000-page biography, dozens of cassette tapes of radio appearances and thousands of pages of handwritten ideas, Gombos easily finds a circular chart he drew up on Aug. 8, 1988, showing how his presidential tournament would work. The outer ring features the 32,768 communities across the nation that would nominate a candidate to be president. Elections would winnow that group down to a county candidate, a sectional candidate, a congressional district candidate and so on until that process would give us the best of the East, West, South and Midwest, as does the NCAA tourney. A penultimate vote would reduce the Final Four candidates to the two-person race we have most election years.

"Of course, my ideas were not acceptable to most people," admits Gombos, who turns 80 in July but still works as hard as he did in the 1960s, '70s and '80s when he was an official supplier to the U.S. Olympic teams or the person providing Charlton Heston with the jogging suit the actor wore in the 1971 classic movie "The Omega Man."

Gombos will set up shop Saturday at Rolling Meadows High School selling T-shirts ("I sell them for $7 each and donate $2 back to the school") promoting badminton, gymnastics and other sports.

A champion gymnast during his years at the University of Illinois, Gombos often celebrates the value of teammates working hard toward a common goal - something we don't always see in politics, where the desire to win elections and loyalty to a political party trump the best interest of the nation. George Washington, in his Farewell Address after serving as our nation's first president, warned Americans about the destructive nature of political parties.

Watching the NCAA's "Sweet 16" evolve into the "Final Four" the next few days will be a nice distraction from the political news. Unless we discover that the Russians are shaving points.