"What puzzles me is why, with so many potential candidates, you don't get better ones to choose from?

Kitty "

That is because there is a ruling elite behind the scenes, Kitty, an elite which no one gets to vote for or against, and they preordain who the viable candidates will be through the mechanisms of the major political parties...and they make sure by controlling the purse strings that those, and only those candidates get enough funding and media coverage to have any realistic chance of being elected.

Thus the end result is preordained. The public gets presented with machine-picked candidates who are merely front men (or women) for the controllers who stand largely unseen behind them. They're figureheads. Whichever candidate wins, the controllers are still in control. The controllers own the banks, the media chains, and the military-industrial complex. By the power of money they rule. (There is often some infighting between various of the controllers, and that can get quite complex, I'm sure, but in their overall objectives they are for the same basic agenda, both nationally and worldwide, and it's all driven by money.)