Too Much, Too Fast

I'm increasingly uncomfortable with how fast and how early the 2008 presidential election contest is developing. Senator Barak Obama, who announced he was exploring the possibility of his candidacy several weeks ago, is going to officially announce he's running today.

Update: Obama's announcement is here, and the Post story here. A key paragraph of Obama's remarks:

What's stopped us from meeting these challenges is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans. What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics -- the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems.

He has some very innovative ideas about how he'll run his campaign, but I can't help feeling that more than a year before the first primary is way too much time for the increasingly irresponsible and irrational media and political complex to destroy every viable candidate in existence. We're leaving this all up to the same people who dropped everything happening on the planet to saturate the airwaves with Anna Nicole, along with the ones who gleefully passed around ever more elaborate lies about Speaker Pelosi's method of travel.

And this whole money thing--the amounts being raised, the tactics some are allegedly using to raise it and deny it to others-- is disgusting. I hope that imitating the 2000 cash-hauling campaign of G.W. Bush is not the best Hillary Clinton can do.

All this early frenzy distorts the actual value of the primary campaigns, which is to spread and test good ideas. John Edwards has some, notably on health care and restoring the American middle class, Bill Richardson has sophisticated and strong statements on global policy, including the Climate Crisis, but they have to survive as candidates long enough to get into meaningful debates, and get some attention.

Of course the frenzy makes us all even more anxious about the election almost two years away. A year ago, John McCain was the frontrunner, but he isn't any longer, even among Republicans. Rudy Giuliani looks like the strongest GOP candidate, although commentator Lawrence O'Donnell predicts that McCain and other Republicans will attack him so hard in the primaries that he will be mincemeat, leading to a Democratic victory. (But then O'Donnell also predicted that after Joe Liebermann lost his primary, he would drop out of the race entirely months before the election.)

Then there's the news and rumors swirling around Al Gore, now up for a Nobel Prize as well as an Academy Award, and there's even some activity among those interested in drafting him. Well, there's only one person who could run I am convinced would be elected, and that's Gore. I'm for him, primarily because of the Climate Crisis, but also on the war and other issues, and there is such buyer's remorse for GWB that he would win in a landslide. But if you ask me it's way too early for him to get into this, although I understand the anxiety of those who are worried that Hillary is going to sew this up soon. It's this preposterous all or nothing jag we're on that is yet another extremism that just may do us in.