Becoming President is a Running Gag

I am not a political animal. If any of the readers out there remember my father, he was very aware and savvy about politics. My oldest brother, who shared the same name as my father, has been involved in covering politics as a newspaper guy for years and he eats the stuff up with a spoon. My interests lie more in the world of humor. Wait a minute; I guess we have more in common than I originally thought. Even without choosing sides you have to admit politics makes for strange bedfellows and fantastic fodder for ridicule.
John McCain clinched the Republican nomination. He had reached the number of required delegates through the primary process and his only remaining opponent dropped out of the race. The next day George W. Bush endorsed him for president. Way to get out in front of this issue Mr. President. Your choices were McCain, Obama, Clinton, or you could go off the board and bring Dan Quayle out of moth balls. This was a no-brainer (boy, that’s a straight line which is hard to resist). Oops, I forgot Ron Paul is still running for the Republican nomination, but everybody else has forgotten too. Who would vote for a 47 year old drag queen who gave us such hits as “Supermodel” and “Looking Good, Feeling Gorgeous”? Huh? Ohhh, that was RuPaul not Ron Paul, never mind.
Other than filling hour after hour of television programming, giving coffee shops throughout the land conversation starters, and making monologues easier for late night comedians the primary process seems unnecessary. Really, I went back and looked at the results for the first primary in New Hampshire on January 8th of this year. The winning Republican was John McCain. Two months, eleven caucuses, and twenty-eight primaries later the Republican nominee is…John McCain.
On the Democratic side Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were two percentage points apart with Mrs. Clinton coming out on top. Now in March, there are four percentage points separating the two candidates (when you do math using the number of delegates each has earned to this point) with Mr. Obama holding the advantage. John Edwards could have saved a fortune in haircut money if we had just let the New Hampshire-ites decide things.
The truly scary part is not the time spent and sheer number of political food fights which have taken place. The scary part, scary like coming face-to-face with Norman Bates while taking a shower, scary like coming face-to-face with a great white shark while swimming off Amity Island, scary like coming face-to-face with Joan Rivers when rolling over to turn off the alarm clock in the morning, is the amount of money spent on these campaigns. Come on, Tom Tancredo is listed by CNN as having spent $3,458,130 in order to drop out of the race before the first caucus, before the first primary and to never get closer to a delegate than to carry his bag into the hotel in Minneapolis during the national convention in September. I didn’t spend one thin dime and I can do that.
Once again using CNN’s website as my source, I used my handy calculator to figure the two parties have spent $683,438,239 on the campaign through February first. Let’s take a moment to digest that. That would cover 7.3% of the estimated national debt. That amount of money could build 11,390 Habitat for Humanity homes in the United States or 854,297 homes in some developing countries. We could send 3,745 students to Harvard, for four years. That money could be used to take the entire population of Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado, Iowa and throw in both Dakotas, to McDonald’s for breakfast lunch and dinner, twice. (I actually did the math.)
Does anyone else out there remember when the conventions were not just weeklong infomercials for the candidates? I liked watching them when there was, at least on the surface, a modicum of suspense about who was going to be nominated. The best part was when the guy at the podium would call the roll of each individual state. Then the spokesperson for that state would launch into his three minutes of fame. “Mr. Chairman the great state of Wisconsin, the dairy land of the nation, the land of one point four million cows, the state capable of making enough cheese to cover an enchilada the size of Pangea, casts its votes for the next president of the United States of America, Eugene McCarthy.”