IMO the one critical element the game lacks is dealing with the political fallout of all your campaign promises. If this game were half of a political game and the other half was living down your election strategies while in office (in a similarly abstracted way) the game would have a lot more oomph to it. That way it wouldn't be such a simple strategy for me in the election to decide to make some issue the other candidate hasn't campaigned on and is week the MAIN issue of my campaign out of the blue. It's a pretty simple tactic right now to pick on some issue the other candiate is in a hole in (due to party politics) and ram it hard into him, even though as a platform plank it would a tough thing to do whgile in office and would probably cause you to lose serious clout come next election.
Anyway, jsut a though...
