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.