The end of endless campaigns

I have a lot of reasons to hope that Kamala Harris wins, but there’s one reason I’m hoping everyone can get behind: Proof that political campaigns can be done in 90 days.

As I approach the age for medicare and social security, I can’t remember a time when American political campaigns didn’t last “years.”

But I’ve read where it is possible? That before 1960, campaigns took months (even weeks) compared to the years long death marches that have filled my TV screen with scary images of nuclear war or caravans of criminals with pigment.

I’ve heard that campaigns in the UK, Israel, France and elsewhere can be even shorter. With “snap” elections called at the drop of a hat and run through (or over) the voters in just a few months.

God wouldn’t that be good.

It seems as if 90 percent of the US has fallen into one camp or another. Sure a lot of us call ourselves independents — it’s easy to hate on both parties — but come voting time we keep pulling the lever based on R’s or D’s. Often in exactly the patterns our parents used to do or following the lines of our partners (or preachers) without much thought.

It doesn’t take years to get to “know” a candidate. We knew who Donold Trump was the day he rode down that escalator, and they found the “grab em by the pussy” tape. It took less than a week for us to figure out who Kamala Harris is and only a day to get to know her little buddy “Coach Walz”.

People figured out JD Vance was a weirdo in less than 2 hours. Even when he completely flips his political positions, he can’t hide the Yale graduate, Tech-bro, elitism that he slathered all over himself to forget his Hillbilly Elegy.

I remember a doctor telling me that if he couldn’t figure out “what was wrong with you in 15 minutes, he didn’t belong in the profession.”

I’d say the same is true for most voters. They take the measure of the candidate in minutes.

This small percentage of “swing” voters who float back and forth between parties and take their time to take a stand, can do it a lot faster. I think many of them don’t spend much more than 15 minutes making their final decision. They can just put off that 15-minutes of thinking for years.

I don’t have a problem with the opposition research and candidate vetting taking months or even years. We should learn about all those skeletons in every campaign closet. But let them do that shit behind closed doors. We don’t need to hear about it, until we are down to the top contenders.

Most of the worst contenders probably drop out or get pushed out as soon as that research folder gets passed around.

Most of the time all these “researchers” wait for October to come out with the good shit anyway, so why go through the months and months of primaries and candidate forums and endless TV talk just to find out she sent private emails, or he spent time on Epstein’s island?

Sure, sure, candidates can say something stupid, or do something stupid in the last months of the campaign that cost them the election (remember Michael Dukakis in the tanker’s helmet?). But we don’t need years to wait for the gaff — if it’s coming it will come in weeks not years.

Give the unlikeables a chance

Frankly, I would hope a short campaign season would give the “unlikeable” candidates a better chance.

Likable Presidents haven’t really been all that great. Ronald Reagan was “likable” even when he was secretly making deals with Iran to hold onto the hostages and later to trade missiles and cash. George W. was likable and then forgot about terrorists only to draft us into decade long wars…

Barack and Michelle Obama are still very likable, but Joe Biden (who no one really “likes”) got more done with a hell of a lot less.

Hilary was “likable enough.” But that couldn’t last for the years it took for her to get a nomination and then run. By the end of that 8-year-odyssey everybody was a little sick of her and she dipped in the polls and voting at just the wrong time.

Can you imagine how much better the world would be if Al (God he’s so boring) Gore and Hilary (likable enough) Clinton had won? We would have never started the war in Iraq. Trump fascism would be a small footnote from 2016, and Roe vs Wade would still be the law of the land.

Unlikeable presidents seem to be some of the ones we remember the most. FDR was a patrician in a wheel-chair who was a class-traitor who angered almost everyone who knew him well — including his cousin/wife Eleanor.

Abraham Lincoln didn’t have a lot of friends, spoke in a squeaky voice and faced long bouts of depression. Probably never would have been elected in the 20th Century with the years of campaigning and all the TV time. That sad face would look like shit on TikTok.

So let’s hope 2024 is the year we learn — we can pick a president in less than 3 months. Let’s do that shit again next time.

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