Jim Kershner: Desperate times call for presidential politics
Everybody agrees that the presidential campaign has begun too early.
“It’s barely 2007,” I hear people say. “We have to put up with this for almost two entire years? Oh, please. Just claw the eyeballs out of my head right now.”
This is the lament of not just a few, but an entire weary nation. Every pundit and every pollster concurs: The sentiment is unanimous.
Umm, not quite.
My fellow Americans, for me, the 2008 presidential campaign couldn’t have begun early enough. Maybe I’m the only person in the U.S. who feels this way, but for months how I have been reveling in the knowledge that we don’t have to wait until some arbitrary starting time – say, the actual year the election is held – to begin the fun.
To Barack, to Hillary, to Rudy, to John – and yes, even to Bill (Richardson), Christopher (Dodd) and Tommy (Thompson) – I have these following words of encouragement, immortalized by the man who presently holds the coveted office:
Bring it on. (Heh heh).
Why wait until Iowa? Why wait until New Hampshire? Our country needs a presidential race, and needs it now, for purposes I’ll discuss farther down.
Meanwhile, we break in for a question forming on the lips of thousands:
Q: Are you nuts? Why would we want to listen to month after month of the same old empty promises, attack ads, artificial campaign brouhahas and sanitized stump speeches delivered at $1,000 a plate fundraisers?
A: What? You have something more important to do? Like watch “American Idol”?
Listen, a presidential campaign is just as much fun to watch as “American Idol” or “Survivor” for most of the same reasons. Some contestants will screw up, some will blossom under pressure, some will come from nowhere to contend for victory, some will become their own worse enemies, some will get tossed onto the trash heap when they least expect it and one will navigate through all dangers to victory. Why wouldn’t you want that show to last two years?
Also, a presidential race has one further attribute: It actually matters.
It makes a difference to your life, your country, your world and to the course of history. Isn’t that worth two years of our attention?
Yet I have a more personal reason for being among the .01 percent of the nation downright giddy about this situation. I just happen to have a soft spot for the entertainment value of presidential elections in general. At our house, Election Day ranks right up there with Opening Day as a national holiday. A presidential race is just as much fun to follow as the NCAA basketball tournament and, let’s face it, the NCAA tournament lasts almost as long. I’m not an election nerd or anything, but I’m working on my presidential brackets as we speak.
Meanwhile, I’m in the middle of a book, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which devotes hundreds of pages to the presidential race of 1860. This book is as gripping as any Stephen King thriller and vastly more entertaining than anything Dan Brown could ever contrive.
So if I were to be among the majority irritated by this premature electioneering, I’d have to ask myself this question: Shouldn’t I devote at least as much energy to caring about what will happen in 2008 as I have to studying 1860? By the way, if you require evidence that a presidential race profoundly alters the course of history, see: Lincoln in 1860.
Finally, I offer this overriding reason as to why an early presidential race actually does the country good: It’s a daily reminder that the current administration’s days are numbered.
Now do you understand why I find it so gratifying to see Rudy and Hillary and Co. out there on the hustings, clawing their way slowly but surely toward November 2008?
Go ahead and dismiss me as some kind of Bush-bashing Bin Laden lover. But I think this is a bipartisan issue. At this point in the current administration, Democrats, independents and even Republicans can all agree:
It’s such a relief to stop obsessing about this president and start obsessing about the next one.