Primarily passé: Presidential primaries are overdone
I’m done with the presidential primaries.
Really, I’ve been over them for weeks now. I was over them before Super Tuesday. I was over them before they even began.
And who can blame me? Everyone has been talking incessantly about the 2008 presidential election since 2004, with speculation heating up dramatically last summer. Especially for hopeful Democrats, the topic of the 2008 presidential nominees has been forefront dinner party conversation material. But why is it such a hot topic so many months before the actual election?
Most notably, the primaries this year come drastically earlier than they ever have before, with more and more states pushing to the front of the line, attempting to substantiate their vote.
An editorial published in The New York Times last September commented that “the presidential primary system is broken.” That is, states don’t get equal treatment because candidates are more likely to offer big promises to the states whose votes will actually count. The Times blames the system for the unprecedented push for earlier primaries.
Or maybe states like Florida and Michigan moved for earlier election dates out of sheer frustration with the current administration. In my mind, the 2008 presidential election is like having a birthday party after being released from prison: You plan it meticulously for years because it’s all you have to look forward to.
Whatever the reason, America has caught primary fever.
In some ways, this has had positive ramifications. On Super Tuesday (Feb. 5), Democrats set records for high voter turnout in 12 states and Republicans in 11. The overall turnout was 27 percent of eligible citizens, which beat the previous record from the 1972 primaries (a 25.9 percent turnout), according to a report in The New York Times.
And let’s not forget that bloggers and independent pundits are having a heyday, selling “Barack My World” T-shirts and “Hillary Is My Homegirl” bumper stickers by the bucketload. With the rise of the Internet, being political has never been so easy.
Maybe that’s the problem.
I don’t know when it happened, but at some point, coverage of the presidential primaries turned into its own version of Us Weekly. Reputable newspapers started running less-than-newsworthy stories on a daily basis. The Washington Post, for instance, printed an in-depth analysis on Hillary’s V-Neck suit entitled “Hillary Clinton’s Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory” in July. How pressing (no pun intended).
Every national newspaper seems to be playing the paparazzi game, trying to be the first source to report a snide remark or an unexpected moment. Last week, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The National Post each reported that John McCain called Barack Obama naïve on the headlining pages of their Web sites, as if the remark was on par with mass genocide.
If that wasn’t proof enough that the presidential primaries have become veritable tabloid fodder, Us Weekly itself printed a “Hot Pic” of Barack Obama in his swimming trunks (alongside pictures of Matthew McConaughey) over the summer. Last week the trashy magazine ran a full two-page spread called “Hillary Clinton: My Worst Outfits Ever!”
Actually, none of this would be that serious if the smattering of over-dramatized presidential “news” wasn’t overshadowing more important domestic affairs. Every day I cringe as I open the newspaper to spread after spread meticulously dissecting every insignificant detail about the campaign trail, while big domestic stories get pushed to page A27.
Did you know, for example, that the wealth gap among American colleges was reported yesterday to grow significantly last year? Or that a federal judge recently absolved the Army Corps of Engineers of liability in the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina?
Here’s another item that got pushed to the back of the paper last week: A bill was passed in Congress to outlaw the CIA from using waterboarding and other forms of torture against terror suspects. The president, as you might imagine, is expected to veto it.
Senators Clinton and Obama, by the way, abstained from voting on that bill. I guess they didn’t want to talk about it. There are more important things to pay attention to right now—Hillary’s tear ducts and Barack’s wife, for instance.
It’s great that people are paying attention to politics, but it’s important not to forget that the United States is more than just its president. Electing someone new is not going to magically end all the other problems America is plagued with every day.
We have a responsibility to pay attention to everything; and after we’ve cast our ballots, we must work towards cultivating change in all aspects of our lives.
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