Bitching about Campaigning

In my best Seinfeld-style voice, "all this campaigning and spending of money on campaigning and being too busy campaigning to do your actual job.... what's up with that?"

Okay, as distasteful as I find Presidential campaigning, I can understand it... to a point.  And if it's your first time running for a position, yeah, I get that too... you have to be able to tell people your views and you don't have a track record to stand on.  But if you're the incumbent for most other local elected offices, from Mayor to State Rep to Congressional Rep or Senator, if you're doing your job right, you shouldn't have to campaign at all.

With the prevalence of technology today, if you have even a halfway-decent public affairs (PA) person, your constituents should be fully aware of exactly what you've been doing and why.  Your PA rep should have you doing Tweets a couple of times a week, updating a Facebook page and your official site, and at least once or twice a month getting a story on something you're working on in the news.  If you really are doing your job and not just dicking around, the public should know exactly what you've been up for the past term, and therefore whether or not you're a slacker and if they should bother to vote for you.  Not to mention with everyone having a certain level of Google-Fu and total access to your entire history, what can you really tell them that they can't get on their own, unless you're just trying to blow smoke up their asses?

For that matter, why would a sitting President even bother campaigning for re-election?  The President's in the news EVERY DAY.  The entire world knows exactly what the President's been up to, their successes and failures.  So why do a bus tour touting your wares?  They're already out there for the world to see.

So, to the entire current crop of incumbent elected politicians:  a decent skilled PA rep is a lot less costly to the public than all these b.s. campaign trips.  Stop talking about what you could do for us in your next term and get your asses to work NOW.  And if you do, and you're good at it (or even if you're not that good at it but show a decent amount of integrity, honesty and vision in the position), you'll probably get my vote.

And today's post is... ranting all over the place, I guess

So with the raising of the debt ceiling, Congress is all out in the streets proclaiming how the President has ruined the US's credit rating and destroyed the economy.  Sad when our own government need to take Gov't 101. I'm not a fan of many of President Obama's policies either, but the President doesn't have the authority to spend money (with some very small exceptions). Per the Constitution, the authority to tax & spend lies with Congress, & every member of Congress, no matter what party, no matter now or in the past, has worked diligently to get us into this massive cluster f*ck.

And honestly, the responsibility for this mess lies with TWO sources: the governmet and the American people. This is our own fault... we demanded the government produce all these goods and services, whether it was military spending, pork barrel projects (notice how when it's in your neighborhood it's a good thing? Everywhere else it's pork?) or social programs, and the government - including members of both parties - spends and gives us exactly what we asked for.

To be honest,  my main beef with Congress lies not in what they've done, but in their failure to take responsibility. I've screwed up in life - lots. But since I've been a mature adult (I'll argue with friends about the "mature" label later ;-) ), when I screw up I admit it, take responsibility, apologize, make efforts to fix it, & move on. Gov't lack of responsibility is what drives MY total lack of respect for them. If they'd take responsibility, I'd be willing to move past it.

Plus, I think the people in power are so full of themselves and so enamored of hearing their own voices, I swear they're blinded to the wishes and reactions of the American people.  This nice little article in The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/independents-hate-both-parties-as-never-before/243162/) echoes what's being seen more and more around the country:  that both major parties are hemorrhaging members - mostly younger people who aren't willing to sit around and let someone else speak for them - who are re-registering as independents.  I like the way one reader commented about the major parties in an online comment:  "It's like trying to decide between two bowls of crap that you're forced to eat and basing your decision on whether you'd prefer having corn or peanuts in it."