Barring something truly hideous or shocking in the next nine days the election has become what everyone thought it would be two years ago: a Blue year. This raises an interesting question which, sadly, will be completely ignored because way too many people stand to make money by ignoring it. What, exactly, was the point of having a two year long presidential campaign?
Barack Obama and John McCain announced their presidential bids in February of 2007. That’s eleven months before the first primary votes and twenty one months before Election Day. What was happening in February of 2007? Well, the Democrats had just gained control of Congress the month before, Bush the Younger had recently shelved the Baker-Hamilton Iraq report and decided to send more troops instead, and the economy was in okay shape. Bear Stearns chief US economist was quoted in the 2 February 2007 New York Times saying that the manufacturing sector “is poised for stronger growth” and “There’s a lot more to this economy than housing and cars.” The day before McCain formally announced his presidential bid Lehman Brothers announced that it had paid its CEO $40.6 million dollars. That is the environment in which these men began their presidential bids.
Obviously things are going to change over that much time and maybe there’s some benefit to seeing what the candidates do in reaction to new developments, certainly you don’t want to just pull a nominee for president out of a hat two months before the election. But the world in 2007 is not the world in which the election is to be held. The conventional wisdom in 2007 was that McCain’s campaign was dead and Hillary Clinton had irresistible advantages for the Democratic nomination. 2008 now sees Hillary Clinton as a failed candidate who ran an incompetent campaign while John McCain swept in and won the Republican nomination when the moral and business conservatives split their votes between Mike Huckabee (who?) and Mitt Romney.
There may be some regret of those decisions these days, and not only because McCain is behind in the polls. The economy was certainly an issue back at the beginning of the year, but no one knew it was going to be like this, and economics is clearly McCain’s weakest issue. Thanks to the ridiculously front loaded primary schedule McCain had the nomination in hand before Bear Stearns went tits up in March. There are probably a lot of Red supporters who would appreciate having had the selection of the nominee a bit closer to the actual election.
On the other side the Blues didn’t finalize their nominee until June, and if you’d told someone in January that that was going to happen they’d have laughed at you and then concluded that surely a primary of that duration would doom (Doom!) the party’s eventual nominee. That also looks to have been foolish overreaction.
It’s certainly important who the President of the United States is, every person on the planet is going to be affected by the outcome of the election next Tuesday. But where is it written that having a year long selection process results in the best candidates? If anything, the opposite is true. It exhausts the candidates, causes the parties to select someone before they can even make informed guesses about what the defining issues will be, and the cartoonish coverage sours the non-political junkie portion of the public on the whole process. No one benefits except the minority of people who are political junkies and the journalists and bloggers who feed their addiction.
These aren’t topics which are on the minds of a great many people nine days away from the election. But it might be worthwhile to take a step back from today’s daily bric-a-brac and consider just how worthless most of the daily bric-a-bracs were last year. This is especially true because the loser’s party is going to begin the selection process again about seven seconds after this one is finished. Choosing nominees and presidents is important, but that doesn’t mean it takes two years to do the job properly.
