After months of baseless speculation, countless weeks listing the pros and cons of the same four people, endless days of trying to come up with the weirdest guess to put in print, we are nearing the actual VP selection!!! Drudge reports that the New York Times reports that Obama has "all but finalized" his decision and is expected to announce...some time this week.
It will be late tonight, or early Tuesday morning! No says Marc, not tonight. Most others, not wanting to end up looking stupid, are sticking with "this week." The crack-head frenzy that began as the already caffeinated tradition of the "Veepstakes" has consumed the spare time of pundits and bloggers for far too long, and a respite, even if only for a week, will be quite welcome (I do not, by the way, exclude myself from this sickness; I count no less than a dozen posts on this blog over the last few weeks regarding this very topic).
Why has this year been so bad? The interest in this year's election has been intense, and as a result the demand for political stories has increased beyond reasonable expectations of supply. Normally, this market failure could be solved by expanding the depth of coverage, but it turns out that the American people aren't really interested in better coverage, or even different coverage: just more coverage. Not depth, per se, but breadth.
Again, I do not absolve myself of these sins, but I like to think that (from time to time) I at least try to elevate the level of discourse we as a society have about politics, and I am RELIEVED that in a few days, I'll be able to spend more time doing that, instead of being the 10,000th person to comb through Obama's press statements for hidden messages about red-state governors.
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If the nomination of the "heartbeat away" candidate rests more on the sway the prospective named may have on the outcome of the general election than on any experience, skills, personal integrity, or political vision that the potential VP (hence, by definition, potential President) may bring to the table, how, exactly, does that reflect on the significance of the Presidency itself? In fact, what does it have to say about your political process, in general? Every election cycle, the tide of your media coverage drags your nation further and further from the shores of the democratic principles on which its governance was founded. Americans must learn to ignore the political shallows of media frenzy and begin to think for themselves.
Well said Guiseppe. Well said.
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