Today’s edition of “Fish, Meet Barrel” is provoked by an incredibly silly article in Slate (shocking, I know).
Alec MacGillis is full of sad:
It’s a quadrennial complaint, but I’m going to make it anyway, and make it earlier than it’s been made before, because the problem has somehow managed to get even worse: It is simply insane how much we’ve pushed up our presidential campaigns.
Okay, first of all, you’re way behind the curve here, friend. People have already been complaining about the early start to the campaign for years. Getting in on the game now is like writing a bold post in 2015 on the subject: “it’s finally time for someone to say it: people sure are into kale these days!”
The 2016 campaign started in the spring of 2008, when Obama locked up the Democratic nomination and Hillary had to start thinking about her next shot. And it’s been going on since then. It was going on in 2012, as various Republicans watched the Romney campaign and started making adjustments in their own policies and personas. It was certainly going on all last year. And now, in 2015, it’s been going on long enough that candidates have already had time to run, fail, and drop out.
Because look, campaigns are much more than handshaking in Iowa and New Hampshire, or debates. They’re a race for institutional support, party allegiance, and money. If you want to be president, you’d have to be insane to think that your campaign begins the day you announce.
And here’s the other thing: that’s good. Being president is really, really important. It’s probably the single most important job in the world. Given that, it’s completely reasonable that campaigns are long and grueling affairs. If you don’t want to read about it, you are more than free to ignore horse-race stories on the subject. But that doesn’t mean everyone else is obliged to follow suit.
And if you want to wax nostalgic for the old days when campaigns were short, you ought to at least acknowledge that it was only possible because there was very little democratic influence over the process before 1968. And even then, it’s not that the campaigns were shorter, it’s just that the invisible parts were longer. Campaigns have always been icebergs, with most of the important stuff happening below the surface. It’s just that now we have better techniques for interpreting what’s going on in the deep water.