WE live in a political battleground state. Regardless of which side of the aisle you favor, this is not a great thing.  Since the middle of August we have been inundated daily with TV and radio ads, as well as one or more of the following:

• robocalls
• personal phone calls
• telephone opinion polls
• political mailings
• lawn signs
• people at the front door
• bumper stickers on cars.

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FOR those of you not living in a battleground state it’s difficult to get across to you how intrusive*, annoying & wasteful this really is.  I’ve never seen a presidential campaign like this one that diminishes the office of president and insults a voter’s intelligence with incessant gibberish and visual clutter.  It’s quite something.

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WHILE I trust that the election on Tuesday will put an end to this nonsense for now, I worry that this 2012 presidential election will become the prototype for all future elections.  Because I fear that the lesson of this election is: if you want to make sure that no one gives a flying fig through a donut hole about who wins an election, bother the electorate every day until they are just too tired to care about it any more.  Then railroad your candidate through.

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[H/T to Pied Type for the YouTube link.]

[H/T to Carmine Coyote & his defunct blog, Slow Leadership, for the cartoon.  Image & link removed because spammers could not leave it alone.]

[* Case in point: while writing this post yesterday afternoon I’ve received two phone calls.  One was a real person who told me who to vote for and then hung up on me without so much as a thank you for listening or a goodbye.  The other was a robocall from a doctor somewhere in Washington, D.C.]

[Further: Throughout the rest of the day I received two more unsolicited political phone calls.  One was a robocall from a nurse in Chicago.  The other was a robocall from an actor in CA.]