Spit and vinegar

A Couple of years ago I worked on a political campaign, after 8 years of working for a political lobbyist. After what was a pretty brutal experience I finally came to the conclusion that working 80+ hours a week for a cause, no matter how much I believed in it, was not helping me or the cause. I noticed I was becoming a mean person without provocation, the whole political process necessitates you villanize your opponent and their supporters. On more than one occasion I found my friends the target of my, or my campaign's, attacks. Consequently, I gave up working for campaigns and campaign style organizations. To date this year I had been enjoying watching the presidential race unfold from the sidelines, it's the first year I didn't know who I was going to vote for and I was kind of enjoying prognosticating from an impartial sideline.

Recently, I settled on a candidate, I was originally a Biden supporter, who shall remain nameless for this post. Since making a decision I have noticed a bit of a change in my own orientation to the opposition candidate. Every accusation they make about my candidate I find myself uttering a bitter response under my breath. Every time I hear the opposition candidate talk about how they do one thing or another better or have a better plan for some other thing I find myself rationalizing how that doesn't matter. I'm not sure if it is left over instincts from campaigning or my own competitive instinct coming through but either way I'm not terribly happy with it.

More importantly I'm not terribly happy with the way campaigns have created a world where we can't talk about politics without knock down drag out dogma wars. I want to talk politics freely without someone having to be right at the end of the conversation. Why do we have to win political battles based on who has the most successful branding and who comes out on the correct side of each sound bite war?

Not that I have any grand solutions but there are a couple of things I think could help tame all the spit and vinegar coming out of campaigns. I would like to see each candidate give a couple 30 minute, nationally televised, speeches on the most important issues, as voted on by all of us. Of course I think the debates are an important gauge of how they deal with confrontation, so we should keep those around. Finally, I would like to see us take a lesson from the French and tell them all to shut up and let us think for a little bit by putting a media ban on political campaign for 30 days before the election.

I know this post doesn't hold together from beginning to end, but I just needed to get that off my chest.