POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS RUN AMOK

It’s difficult to find any average citizen who doesn’t express frustration with the seemingly never-ending political campaigning prior to any election. It begins months before any given election, sometimes more than a year. The result being the airwaves are glutted with political ads, the majority of them simply throwing dirt at the opposing candidate; highways and streets cluttered with signs for various candidates; and obscene amounts of money spent on all this. In today’s world, especially, it seems more than criminal to spend money in this manner when food pantry shelves are nearly empty and more and more U.S. citizens are becoming homeless, often through little or no fault of their own. You will also occasionally hear a politician complain that too much of their time is spent in fund raising activities when they could be using that time to do what they were elected to do.

I have an idea for fixing this problem. Limit all campaigning to no more than two months prior to any election. It seems to me that if a candidate can’t explain who they are and what they stand for in two months, they probably have no business holding the office they are seeking.

Yes, I know, there would be a giant outcry about first amendment violations. Perhaps we could circumvent this by pointing out that this type of speech isn’t “free.” Go ahead and say anything you want, anywhere you want, so long as you are not spending money to do it, except for the two months prior to the election.

I don’t have the organizational skills to promote an idea like this, and for reasons I prefer not to go into, I don’t have the energy to do it even if I did have those skills.

Is there anyone out there who might be interested in taking on the challenge of changing the way political campaigns are handled?