A Better Way of Electing a President

I have been thinking more about the election process. All the spending on ads seems wasteful to me, even if it is educating the public about the candidates. It seems more important for a candidate to create the impression of being able to be a good president than for them to actually be a good president. It is really similar to the "branding" process that companies use to get people to buy their products. They create an aura of goodness around their product, which (so I have heard) has more of an impact on sales than the quality of the product. Now, I tend to think this is a problem, and not a good way for our society to choose its leaders.
The real question is, what kind of system would work better than this one? Well, giving the discourse over picking candidates more of a direction would help. Something more substantial than those CNN debates, which seem more about talking points than debating the issues and trying to find practical solutions to the problems our society is facing. In fact, I think our leaders should have to prove their organizational and leadership abilities with more than their past. We could create a system of rites that the candidates have to complete to be eligible for the post. These rites would be designed to themselves strengthen our country and make things better. So, it would be a win-win... instead of deciding who rules us based on talking points, we would judge it based on their actions and effectiveness. Plus, all that campaign money would be siphoned into making our country better. The news agencies would be required to give equal coverage to all the candidate's activities, so they need not worry about advertising for their campaigns. They might need to advertise for the rites though, so that could be problematic.
Here are a few ideas i came up with while brainstorming. A "rite of development" which would be trying to improve a economically depressed town. A "rite of peace" which would be traveling to an opponent nation to try to increase ties. A "rite of poverty" which would require the candidate to fully live in poverty for a month. A "rite of leadership" which would involve coordinating a group of people to solve a problem. And you can design rites to address some of the major problems of the day, like the environment and inequality.
I think this would generally be a better way of judging the worth of a presidential candidate.

Well, with this and the last post, I think I am back up to the 1 post a week average.