Welcome to the day after Labor Day, which in Florida means at least six more weeks of unrelenting heat and humidity. It's also when political commentators like to write and/or say that the fall campaign has now "officially begun."
But who are they kidding? If only our major elections lasted only two months (which is actually the case in Great Britain's campaign for Prime Minister). Our biggest campaign in Florida in 2014, the Rick Scott-Charlie Crist gubernatorial food fight, truly started well before this year even began.
However, when it comes to the oversaturation of campaign coverage, nothing in our country compares what presidential candidates receive, and they've only increased in duration over the decades.
Let's go back to not that long ago in time. Bill Clinton did not announce his candidacy for the 1992 presidential nomination until October of 1991. (Mario Cuomo, the man many Democrats were hoping would run that next year, waited to announce that he would not be running until shortly before Christmas of 1991).
Flash forward to the 2008 elections: John Edwards got out in front of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama by announcing his candidacy on December 28, 2006. Hillary Clinton came out three weeks later, on January 20, 2007, and Obama made his announcement on a freezing Chicago Saturday on February 7, 2007.
Wanna bet that some of those Republicans running for president in 2016 are not going to wait until even late December, like Edwards did, in '06, to make their announcements? No, you can fully expect to hear something about an exploratory committee from the likes of Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and yes, maybe Marco Rubio sometime in November, shortly after the midterm election. In fact, maybe some Republican will want to make some news by making such an announcement before November 4.
And while that's ridiculously early, it's just the way our system has been going. Lining up strategists and campaign donors dictates this to some extent, but our media also has to owning some responsibility for this.
Say what you will about how Barack Obama is doing in office, the problems that he's confronted this summer (in particular on the world stage) have stopped the endless drivel about Hillary Clinton's potential candidacy. It's time national political reporters stopped fantasizing about what some other politician might do in the highest office in the land, and concentrate about what our current one is doing now....
