Candidates matter, like it or not
What sirspens is advocating above amounts to direct democracy, a system where all individuals always participate in all collective decisions. Unfortunately, this is a most cumbersome, boring and impractical political system in populous societies.
It has been tried, but it tends to die out, after the first enthusiasm has left the participants. And believe me, it dies out quite soon. It doesn't take very long until people realise what immense amount of work and effort everybody has to put in, in order to really make decisions about everything, from local garbage collection, the colour of zebra crossing stripes, etc., etc., and the latest trade treaty with Honduras. In addition, direct democracy can be dangerously vulnerable to dirty tricks by demagogues with an anti-democratic agenda.
Hence, what most democratic nations practice instead is representative democracy, where you vote for someone whom (and whose agenda) you trust and who then makes all the boring (as well as the interesting) decisions for you, as your representative. Like sirspens most eloquently describes, this can certainly turn out very badly, like with Mr G W Bush, the present War-and-Torture President of the US.
But the upside of this system is that you can always get rid of bastards without bloodshed (even if it frequently means replacing them with different bastards). So -- being able to get rid of bastards without bloodshed is the main point of representative democracy -- not arriving at the right decisions.
So support of candidates IS important, after all.