The Long Slog

Today I spent quite a bit of time with my brother and his family. His wife is from Japan, and her father holds a local elected post there. He's got an election next week (she said it was Sunday the 24th), but he can't start running any advertising until Tuesday, five days before the voting takes place. At this point, he's not even an announced candidate--the candidates become official in the next couple of days. He's not sitting there doing nothing, of course, because even unofficially, he can talk with people and start gathering support. So he's active, but he's not part of a proper campaign just yet.

Although this might be a bit more than Americans are willing to accept--five days is short notice even for a local election--there's an undeniable appeal to the idea. I'm not going to calculate the precise number of days at this point, but we've got roughly seventeen months until the presidential election. You'd never know it from the active campaigns (as well as a handful of active but not quite announced candidates), and I'm already getting sick of them. The way all the primaries are being moved up to frontload campaign season, we're going to have a Democratic candidate (and quite possibly a Republican one) in place sometime in February, a full nine months before the actual election. I think I've said this before, but whoever we choose as the candidate, we're going to want somebody else by the time we actually step into the voting booth. This is a marathon, not a sprint. I wish some of the candidates would realize that.