The Endless Election

Maybe it's the thrill of competition. Maybe it's the ongoing struggle that the right and the left insist on putting us all through. Perhaps being a political junkie is such an overpowering addiction that during the "downtime" between elections, they just don't know what to do with themselves; they just need that fix. Maybe that's why it seems like we are now ALWAYS in election season.

Now to be fair, there are always elections going on in this country; all localities don't adhere to the same time schedule. Just a few weeks ago, we had local elections for various villages here in the Syracuse area. However, on the national level, things at least took a break every other year (the odd-numbered years) before getting ramped up again for a presidential or congressional election. Those days, apparently, are behind us. Now we have daily coverage of a presidential campaign that is still over 18 months from being decided, and why not, because the primaries that decide the major parties' nominees are moving up earlier and earlier, from the spring into the winter months of 2008.

The way we decide on presidential nominees has certainly changed. Even 40 years ago, the Democratic and Republican conventions were exciting, contentious affairs where the nominee wasn't a sure thing going in. It used to take multiple votes for the parties' delegates to decide who would represent them in the November election. Now, the conventions are little more than a rubber stamp, a stage for more of the bluster and hot air that we've become all too used to in recent years. As a result, the major networks have dramatically reduced their amount of coverage of these conventions, and soon may not even bother with them at all. As for the primaries, they played out over a "season" of sorts, from New Hampshire's "first in the nation" affair in March to California in June, and week by week, the momentum shifted, front-runners changed, history took place.

Back in those days, you could take your time deciding if you wanted to run for president or not. President Lyndon Johnson even waited until after New Hampshire to make his call in 1968, vowing not to run on March 31st of that year. As late as 1992, Governor Mario Cuomo of New York kept us all guessing until the last minute about whether he would run, and only then did the real race for the Democratic nomination truly begin. Bill Clinton took the lead as winter turned to spring, but Gov. Jerry Brown of California gave him all he could handle for months afterward.

But oh, how times have changed. In 1999, I saw my political junkie roommate watching the Republican candidates debating that October, a full year-plus before the election, and 4 months before New Hampshire. That year, George W. Bush and Al Gore had sewn the nominations up by March. Four years later, John Kerry wrapped up the Democratic nomination in early March, after a dizzying few weeks that gave rise to the Howard Dean "scream", showing that you only need the early momentum to win all the needed delegates.

This time around, it gets worse... I don't know if it's "Bush fatigue", that being the desire by many in this country (myself included) for the sitting president's second term to fast-forward to the end, but the contest to see who would replace him was underway about 10 minutes after the midterm congressional elections ended. People seemed to announce their intentions because they HAD to; to wait a rational amount of time now means lost opportunities for fundraising and coverage time on the nightly network news. So here we are, in April 2007, with the presumed field of major party candidates long-since announced, not so much digesting as being force-fed news stories about fundraising totals and speeches and analysis about how a stance on an issue or a slow reaction to a news event could spell doom for a candidate 16 months before the nominating conventions. Hell, some in the media are already declaring John McCain's campaign dead and I'll bet a significant segment of voters DON'T EVEN KNOW HE'S RUNNING YET! Sure, some are hinting that John Kerry or Fred Thompson or even Al Gore may make a last-minute decision to throw their hats in the ring, but unless they then proceed to hit the lottery and win $100 million in campaign funds, they have NO SHOT.

And as for the primaries? Well, they are moving up as well, as states jockey for position. In recent years, larger states like New York and California grew upset about their lack of relevance in a system that seemed to decide the last couple go-rounds in Iowa, New Hampshire, and maybe South Carolina. So they all moved their primary dates up. However, New Hampshire HAS to be first, so they moved up too. Then the other states moved up again. The end result is that your primary schedule now reads thusly: the Iowa caucuses take place on January 14, 2008... barely after you've taken your Christmas decorations down. Then Nevada holds their caucuses on January 19, and New Hampshire will go after that, although they have yet to choose a date, and South Carolina will go shortly thereafter. Then on February 5th, no less than 30 STATES plan to hold their primaries. The ones who have yet to move onto this new so-called "National Primary Day" are feeling the pressure to move their late-February or early-March dates up in order to stay relevant.

So there you have it: it will all be over in about 3 weeks. Presumably, whomever wins Iowa and New Hampshire wins the nomination, as they will have the momentum and the other candidates will have just days to retool and get back on track before the big day on February 5th. Oh by the way, as the primaries move up, the conventions have actually moved DOWN for next year, with the first one being the Democratic National Convention starting on August 25th instead of in July as in the past. Therefore, we will be treated to no less than 6 1/2 months of competing nightly soundbytes between the two presumed nominees before they even get a chance to ACCEPT the nomination. By the time we hit Labor Day, the old theoretical "beginning" of the presidential campaign season, we will be so tired of watching this all play out that NOBODY WILL CARE what happens in November. The end result of this can only be more voter apathy and continuing declines in voter turnout.

Here's my solution: it's too late to do anything about next year, so as soon as 2008 is decided, the Congress passes two laws. One states that there will be NO PRIMARIES before June of an election year. That's it. And no more than 3-5 states per week. Have them run right up to the convention so there is no downtime and go from there. The second law then states NO ANNOUNCING OR FUNDRAISING before January 1, 2008. You break the law and start raising money early? You lose the money. The only way we can stop this whole mess of elongating the campaign season is to take forceful action.

However, some people apparently think that a longer campaign is a great idea, so now the congressional aspirants have joined the fray in declaring early. Dan Maffei, the loser of last November's election here in New York's 25th District, announced that he will run in 2008... on APRIL 7TH, 2007. This of course comes to no surprise to many around here, including myself, who predicted in this very space that he was going to run again, particularly after his whiny "letter of thanks" last January. In fact, I figured he was just going to announce right then and there. And we're already being force-fed political advertising. Gov. Spitzer, in an effort to get his proposed health care changes in the state budget, put advertising on the airwaves to combat the obligatory interest groups who aimed to basically tell people that Spitzer wanted to kill old people. An inventive move to be sure, but it should be noted that the group paying for the ads? "Spitzer 2010". They had to do it under the guise of advertising for an election that is still 3 1/2 years away. Now, we have various peacenik groups buying advertising time around here to push Congressman Walsh to change his mind about not supporting a retreat, errrr, pullout from Iraq. As far as I'm concerned, the ads may as well say at the end: "Paid for by Maffei 2008." Because THAT'S the ultimate goal of these ads; the attempt to get right back to knocking someone out of office as soon as the other side failed at it the last time.

It's gotten to the point where there is NO downtime; it's an endless election season. The day after one campaign ends, another begins. Living to be political, that's what it is. And it's all from the extremes, the right-wing and left-wing. I KNOW we moderates don't want to see this, that's for sure. This cannot end well. What we're going to have to do is build a Betty Ford-like center for recovering political junkies because it's bound to hit a point where they all just crash, or worse yet, OD. And when that happens, it may be the whole political process in this country that gets fatally injured.