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November 05, 2008
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Wednesday
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Ziqa'ad 6, 1429
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A long road to vote
A long road to vote
How long has the presidential campaign been going?
When it started in the spring of 2006, America’s voters worried most about the war in Iraq, consumer confidence had reached a four-year high and the Dow Jones industrial average bumped along comfortably above 11,000.
A former small-town mayor named Sarah Palin faced four others in a debate for governor of Alaska. The forum: Comfish, a fishing industry trade show in Kodiak, Alaska.
And Joe Biden made the first of three announcements. “At this moment,” Biden said during a March tour of South Carolina, “I plan on running.” That watershed would be followed, nine months later, by another announcement. Three weeks later, he was in.It’s been a campaign of halting starts and dazzling flame-outs, of historic firsts and dispiriting sameness. Issues, such as immigration, dominated and disappeared. Candidates strode in, poised to seize the spotlight, and slunk quietly from the stage.Now the longest and costliest presidential campaign in American history, which delivered so little certainty and so much passion, promises a definitive end.
”I tuned out at the campaign’s halfway mark, which was 23 months ago,” author Tom Wolfe quipped. “How is Ron Paul doing?”
But for all those exhausted by the race, many more remained transfixed.
”Yes, there may have been more than the usual nonsense. But this is the way it’s done in this country,” said Richard Ben Cramer, who wrote an acclaimed history of the 1988 presidential campaign. “I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just part of the show. And people are really, really paying attention.”
The campaign began so long ago, it’s hard now to even recall the starting line. Iowans would tell you that, after the 2004 election, John Edwards never really left their state.
Yet most of the men and the one woman who eventually would seek the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations feinted and dodged about their intentions into 2006.
Biden made it official on Jan 31, 2007. He would have been off and running, except he had to spend the day explaining what he meant when he said Barack Obama was “a mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” The senator from Delaware survived his gaffe, but others were done in by theirs.
When the fields came into focus in early 2007, the Democrats had mustered seven candidates. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman who pushed for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, was among them.
The Republicans assembled 11, including Rep. Tom Tancredo, who argued that most of the nation’s ills could be solved if illegal immigrants were kept on the other side of the border.
The Democrats debated or appeared together at forums 26 times before the spring of 2008. The Republicans held 21 showdowns.
Much of the media and the public had waited years expecting to see Clinton ascend to the nomination. But she and the other Democrats had underestimated the Obama phenomenon.
His fundraising and poll numbers never wavered. Not with attacks on his unconventional proposals, including an unusual willingness to talk to foreign dictators. Not by dwelling on his past associations, including with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
Obama and Clinton pummelled each other. Was Obama ready to answer that 3 am phone call in the White House? Did Clinton brave sniper fire on a trip to Kosovo? (The answer to the first remained in debate. But the answer to the second became a definitive “no.”)
Americans can’t wait to write the ending. But they might miss the story when it’s over.—Dawn/LA Times-Washington Post News Service
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