A quick look at my calendar revealed the source of my woes. I saw that November is still three months away. November of 2007. I finally began to wrap my head around the fact that this election we've been obsessing about for eight months already isn't going to happen for another fifteen months (That's 1 1/4 years to you and me, Russ). Once my head was sufficiently wrapped, it began to throb. Fifteen more months of this and I might become a reindeer shaver at the North Pole. And I'm a political junkie.
I'm having a "chicken or the egg" debate about the causes of this ad nauseam election cycle. It seems to be a tie between the added number of early primaries and the attention whore qualities of the average candidate, with the latter having a slight edge. So hypnotic is the effect of the media spotlight that it can make people like Chris Dodd and Ron Paul think they're interesting. The light pulls candidates out of the woodwork and now we're left with what is by far the worst reality show on television. I find myself watching soccer in Spanish on some nights as sort of a mental palate cleanser; it's much better than plowing through another story about whether or not Hillary Clinton showed an eighth of an inch of man-cleavage during a YouTube debate. Seriously, YouTube was made for a lot of things like goofy Will Ferrell videos, salsa dancing chimps and watching drunk celebrities fall on stuff. Hillary Clinton's alleged boobs take the fun out of it.
Unless I move to the middle of the woods and start shooting my meals, I'm bombarded with things like John "Hair Boy" Edwards screaming "Health Care for all, Free Speech for everyone but Fox News!" When the election is five light years away you really have to pace yourself on the weighty issues.
I'm not even old and I remember when the nominees for each party were decided-get this-at the conventions. Seriously! That was back around the time that environmentalists were saying that global cooling was going to kill us; not yesterday, but not that long ago. The conventions have become like the British monarchy: an expensive, useless curiosity. Food Network shows have more suspense.
Half the fun of any presidential election is watching the candidates rip into members of their own parties for months on end then spend a few short months pretending to be friends on the campaign trail. It's American street theater. This new process is depriving us of that fun. If this gets decided early and we're left with just the two candidates droning on for an extended period of time I fear a spike in alcohol related death rates.
Here's my proposal. Let's send the candidates to Baghdad for six months. Let each of them explain why he or she should be the next Commander in Chief to the troops. Let Ron Paul talk to some serious people for once. Let John Edwards get his hair cut, for free, by a man's barber. Something tells me that Hillary would actually prefer to wear fatigues every day. Put Dennis Kucinich in a flak jacket and he might become too top heavy to remain standing. We already know that the one place television cameras don't spend a lot of time is with the troops on the ground so we can be reasonably assured that we don't have to hear from the candidates twenty four freaking hours a day. One more thing: this little overseas excursion might just help the fringe candidates come to grips with just how fringey they are and weed the field out a bit.
Oh-oh...I just glanced at the TV and saw a naked guy running across a Mexican soccer field with "Who Is Ron Paul?" painted on his butt.
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