Doesn’t the US Presidential Election race go on and on?

I’m sure that it isn’t the case, but it feels like the US is always having an election race.  Like those bridge painters who finish at one end and then go back to start again, an election analyst must have a full-time job.  From the moment the President is sworn-in, candidates begin jostling for the front of the queue to be his successor.  When the race is to succeed a two-time President, of course, there are two parties jostling and the queue becomes a shoving match like you’d expect to see at the opening of a new Ikea.  The watching Commander-in-Chief must feel like he’s being measured up by an undertaker just as he hits puberty.   Or perhaps he just remembers going through it himself and thinks “rather them than me”. 

The ‘race for the White House’ this time around has featured a series of contenders of such varying quality that their debates have seemed more like the X Factor auditions.  On the Republican side John “I was a POW, you know” McCain saw off Mike “Chuck Norris supports me” Huckabee, Rudy “Arrest jaywalkers” Giuliani and Mitt “I support this law on abortion, so I’ll vote against it” Romney amongst other freaks.  There was, in truth, such a paucity of choice that McCain’s success as the best of a bad bunch happened early compared to the Democrats.  And that may be his biggest asset in the upcoming campaign because he has been able to stand aside as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (having seen off their blandly competent nominees with rather more difficulty than McCain had in dealing with his screwy opponents) do his job for him and knock seven shades of shit out of one another in their desperate bid to be nominated.  It’s as if they’d rather lose the race to be President, than lose the nomination to the eventual winner.  Would Hillary prefer a McCain presidency to an Obama one?  You’d like to think not, but could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

It seems like every day another story is leaked out with all manner of advisers, close-friends and supporters on both sides lambasting the other candidate.  These stories aren’t interesting, shocking or entertaining, they’re just as dull as you’d expect with two professional politicians.  Let’s face it we aren’t going to learn anything interesting that we don’t already know no matter how much digging goes on.  And what this means is that the same types of story are scrolling on the news channel’s ticker bar every day.  The electorate must be feeling campaign fatigue as acutely as the protagonists by now.  I’m sure that I am. 

“Breaking news here on CNN as Barack Obama acknowledged for the first time that it is Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, PA.  Again.”

I suppose the reason that it’s dispiritingly protracted for me is that I’m English.  In Britain we elect a party not a President.  Its leader is selected by the party and has been in place for years before we’re even asked to choose.  We might chat about the prospect of a forthcoming election sometimes, occasionally quite intensively, but not for long.  There’s rarely much to say.  Indeed Gordon Brown’s decision to ignore the chat lasted just a couple of weeks last autumn, but even that delay has left him treading water until his inevitable defeat in the polls, because he’s widely seen to have dithered and bottled the necessary snap decision.  So we English discuss the prospect of a general election in the disengaged way that we discuss how we will spend our retirement: its inevitable, but we’ll think about it when we have to and not before.  All told a British general election campaign is over within a month.  It may be a pretty frenetic month, though the British don’t do frenetic very well, but it’s all over in less time than it takes most of us to get an appointment with our GP.  In contrast to the US- where it seems to take the majority of the five year term of the sitting President to sort out his successor- we almost seem dynamic. 

And that’s the best argument against having a British President that I’ve yet heard.

~ by theraffishdandy on 23 April, 2008.