How was your Election Day? Hopefully no problems getting out to the polling site, or getting your early ballot back in the mail in plenty of time to count.

The primary election is the easy part, there aren’t as many candidates and generally when the battle is between partisans the rhetoric is scaled back (I said generally).

Even in the council race (which is legally non-partisan) the locals know the candidates better, even personally, and the decisions are easier. Even the excess baggage seems to be limited to a couple of small carry-ons.

As you go up the ladder and the stakes get to higher offices, candidates seem to love digging in the mud. The candidates at the top of the ticket this year both seem to be carrying a couple of steamer trunks on their backs as baggage.

People are lamenting that there have never been two more flawed candidates in an election. Maybe it’s unusual to have them running in the same election, but really, flawed candidates are nearly a tradition in U.S. presidential races.

Who remembers Richard Nixon, Warren Harding, Grant, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Jackson and we are just scratching the surface. Even those historians consider stellar had issues in their day. Nineteenth Century Twitter trolls would have had a field day with Lincoln.

And the founders, two men who worked together on the Declaration of Independence, Adams and Jefferson, tore each other to pieces in the elections of 1796 and 1800. Granted, there were more than just the two candidates, but this is where the two-party system took shape, and they were the stars.

So just where do we find this “perfect” candidate? Screenwriters have tried to give us that perfect image presented by the likes of Harrison Ford, Morgan Freedman, Martin Sheen, Michael Douglas and others (Julia Louis Dreyfus). But what do we really know about these fictional leaders other than their time in front of the camera?

We want superhuman candidates when all that seem to be available are regular human candidates. Oh, sure, they are well educated and have stellar careers in government or private industry, maybe held a cabinet position or been a successful businessman, but don’t pull back the curtain too far.

Don’t voters have a right to want a person of leadership, intelligence and integrity seeking the office of president? Certainly voters have a right to a certain vision of leadership, but they shouldn’t be too surprised if they don’t get it. We are only human after all.