Get ready for the next one

As many political observers have noted, only half-jokingly, the 2012 presidential election essentially begins today.

In fact, for at least two GOP hopefuls, it has already begun.

Fred Karger, a retired political strategist from California, has formed an exploratory committee, the traditional preliminary step to announcing one’s candidacy, and Jon Greenspon, a businessman from Montana, has already filed his intent to run with the Federal Election Commission.

Now, these two little-known aspirants undoubtedly thought they had to get into the race earlier than those who already have substantial name-recognition. But if recent elections are any guide, the big guns won’t be too far behind.

That’s because they all know the importance of developing the vast organization necessary to running a successful campaign as early as possible. As the New York Times noted in an editorial from January 2007, “Presidential campaign pundits were saying that if Senator Hillary Clinton had waited another minute to announce, Senator Barack Obama would have locked up every New Hampshire county committee member and hedge fund billionaire.”

Starting in about January (at the latest), we can expect candidates from at least the GOP (if not also some long-shot Democratic challengers to the president) to begin forming exploratory committees and announcing their candidacies.

Those candidates will spend much of the next year in a handful of early primary states speaking at town hall meetings, attending community events and raising vast sums of money in hopes of earning the chance to spend another nine or 10 months doing the same things in a different set of states.

In a certain sense, the whole spectacle could be interpreted as a long, expensive, emotionally draining, but nevertheless inspiring, exercise in representative democracy.

To a very slight extent, I suppose it is.

However, the process could also be interpreted as a predictable consequence of a troubling combination: the staggering power of the executive branch and the fact that, unlike many parliamentary democracies, we set our elections at regular intervals so everyone already knows when the next one will be.

Although creating a system in which elections occur when our legislators decide to call one instead of at predictable intervals may be a good idea, I am more interested in the first of these two factors — the immense power of the presidency — because it is the one that has changed in recent decades.

That is, we’ve always had regularly spaced elections, but we haven’t always had two-year campaigns.

I think a major reason why the presidential campaign has become such a lengthy affair is this: Both major parties and most relatively interested voters realize that the president wields immense power and can affect the direction the country will take during a four-year period in extremely significant ways.

If the president decides a foreign regime poses a danger to our security or that a sector of the economy is in need of government intervention on a massive scale, it is frighteningly easy to obtain congressional approval for far-reaching actions. This is especially true when the president’s party controls one or both houses of Congress.

People also understand that their choice of a president may determine the ideology of the next two or three people to join the Supreme Court. Because of the myriad areas in which the government is involved, the Court wields an ever-growing power to affect our lives just as meaningfully as Congress and the president do.

As a result, the major parties fight tirelessly to prevent the other party from gaining the power to take actions they think will result in the country’s ruin while wasting valuable time, energy and other resources on what is essentially a zero-sum game.

Instead of spending the time between January 2011 and February 2012 applying their talents to finding solutions to problems that really need solving, dozens of candidates, hundreds of campaign insiders and many thousands of volunteers will be devoting their time and efforts to solving the problem of how to lasso that legendary office and the immense power that comes with it.

All of this will culminate in the selection of the next person to make another futile attempt at molding all 310 million of us to his or her will, while making life even more complicated and politicized than it should be.

I can hardly wait.


E-mail: jarlower@indiana.edu