Long, winding presidential campaign road no good

James Klurfeld

May 2, 2008

This campaign has gone on entirely too long.

I'm not saying that because I have any particular concern that the Democrats are on the verge of sabotaging their chances in November because of a fight for the nomination. That's their problem.

And, for a journalist, the fight has been a great story, which, in my profession, is all you can ever really ask for.

But it's not good for a country to be preoccupied with electoral politics for almost two full years. In fact, it's insane. One survey from the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that in a recent week the candidates received almost 90 percent of media exposure while President George W. Bush received 2 percent. Even given that Bush is a lame duck and this is a scintillating race, it strikes me as weird that the person who can make important life-and-death decisions is given so much less attention than those fighting for the power to make decisions in the future.

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The New York Times recently ran a story looking back at when this campaign began: October of 2006 when Sen. Barack Obama announced he was considering a race for the presidency. It reports the price of gas was $2.20 a gallon, Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense, Dennis Hastert of Illinois Speaker of the House, neither of the Manning brothers had yet won a Super Bowl and Katie Couric had just started as the anchor of the "CBS Evening News."

We are in danger of going into permanent campaign mode. That's no way to run a country, a state or a county, for that matter.

The best example of what's wrong with all this might be the spate of proposals now, at every level of government, to suspend gasoline taxes for the summer tourist season. It's a terrible idea that won't save drivers that much money (if any) but would have the effect of encouraging people to drive more and use more energy, therefore leading to an increase in oil imports, which only will increase the demand and raise the price. It is an idea that runs counter to the view of almost every expert who has said that we need to become less independent on fossil fuels.

But if you're running for office it's a delicious idea. It plays to the crowd, especially in the politically critical suburbs where driving places is a way of life. This is the cynical political credo behind the proposal: Promise the people anything to get elected and worry about the consequences later. A group of Republican state legislators from Long Island has made the gas tax proposal, as have Sen. John McCain and now Sen. Hillary Clinton. To his credit Obama has rejected it (it would take away from the High Trust Fund, he said), but his correct stand isn't likely to help him get any votes in North Carolina or Indiana on Tuesday.

And this isn't the only bad idea that the campaign has engendered. The longer it goes, the more promises the candidates have to make. Clinton and Obama have gone from careful, reasonable proposals for extricating the nation from the mess in Iraq, to outright pledges of how quickly they would get troops out of there. And all the candidates have locked themselves into unrealistic pledges of no new taxes on the "middle class" or tax cuts for everybody that will only make the budget deficit problem facing the next administration, and, more important, the structural financial problems facing our children and grandchildren in the years ahead, much worse.

Political scientists will tell you that politicians usually try to keep campaign promises. Considering some of the promises this year, that is not encouraging. But if they don't, they lose credibility once in office.

Yes, a certain amount of pandering is endemic to democratic campaigns. But when the campaign is never-ending it becomes dangerous to the very fabric of the political system. We're not there yet. But that is the direction in which we are headed.