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.
• • •
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.
• • •
• • •
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.
• • •
[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.]
THE SPECTACLED BEAN 