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“On and on, on and on”

By on March 20, 2012

I have partially tuned out of the ongoing Presidential Primary Contests that just keep rolling along like Old Man River. Unlike the River, they do say something and none of it is new or worth listening to. Romney’s up, then he’s down, Santorum’s surging, now he’s telling Puerto Ricans to learn English if they want to become a state so he’s stumbling. Gingrich is working a new angle. All kinds of issues real and imagined have been raised and aired. They then get chewed on endlessly by the surrogates. A lot of people are still hung up on the business about Mit’s dog on top of the car. Others keep plugging away at Obama’s being a dumbbell on the Keystone pipeline.

Meanwhile the country is being polled to death on anything you can imagine. (How’d you like to have some of the money being spent on that?) Obama is already out there campaigning in March. He’s up, he’s down, he’s getting more approval for handling the economy and then he’s getting blasted for being a wimp. The US populations are getting sliced and diced, dissected and prospected. Every day there is a new poll about something. How do unemployed single Native Americans feel about the birth control mandate? How do gays in the military feel about the rising price of oil at the pump? Some group is undoubtedly finding out.

The trouble is that this political nonsense will keep right on going for 8 more, count’em 8 more months. They have already spend millions upon millions of dollars on the 2012 Election and we are nowhere close to the end. Downtown Abbey or The Sopranos it ain’t. I am encountering more people who are sick of this election already and have stopped listening. So Romney’s people claim he has the math. Who cares? Others say he may lead but not lock this up even at the Convention. So what? He’s out there singing again to a group of seniors. Change the Channel. The President fares just as poorly.

On the home front, economics for most Americans are still not great. People are struggling to pay bills, struggling to pay taxes, struggling to pay for schooling and health care. We are wasting money on this long excessively drawn-out election process when most people would be just as happy to make up their mind election eve on gut instincts. Do they even believe these polls being reported? People are starting to pick apart the sampling populations. By November no one may much care who wins, just so everyone shuts up!

Time to reform the system. Time to establish time limits and spending restrictions on campaigning. If it takes two years and billions of dollars for a candidate to explain himself, he probably shouldn’t be running in the first place.  We should be applying our precious resources like money and time to solving the rising costs of health care and ending the war in Afghanistan, not to financing one long boring political mega-series that is already a loser in the ratings.

 

Tom Godfrey

About Tom Godfrey

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