No, I'm not wishing for a shorter fall. I'd rather have a longer one of those. I keep wishing for fall to begin about mid-August and hang on until Christmas. But as usual in Arkansas, we keep having weird weather. Summer hangs on until mid-November. If we get freezing weather for Thanksgiving that won't leave any time at all for fall, and fall is my favorite season.
The season I wish we could shorten is election campaign season. As I'm writing this I'm still wishing the campaigning season was over and the voting was done. By the time you are reading this the vote will be past. Some will possibly be sighing relief, some will be grieving. Whatever the outcome, some will probably just be glad for no more negative ads, and for something else to talk about on the political analysis TV shows.
I'm thinking back to the good ole days (which weren't always good). In the 1920s, things were going pretty well for awhile; then the bottom fell out and we were into a deep economic depression. Adolph Hitler started trying to take over the world, and in 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we were into the thick of World War II. Those times held lots of grief and sorrow and strain and sacrifice, although they may be times which gave definition and strength to the motto, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave!
I was too young to remember elections before 1948. I do remember listening to the Democratic Convention of 1948 on the radio, and the Republican Convention as well. That was an election in which many people thought President Truman would lose, and one big city newspaper famously came out with its early edition announcing a Dewey victory. But as it turned out, President Truman won re-election after all. As I recall, elections in those days were not so drawn out in time. There was no TV, no smart phones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Internet. There were polls being taken and predictions being made, but as I recall people didn't pay too much attention to the polls, and the radio didn't have constant chatter about how the campaigns were going today. There wasn't the every hour analysis and gauging of who is leading today, and what does everybody think about the latest scandal and what is the latest outrageous statement, and what does so and so need to do to address his or her lagging situation, and who does each campaign need to be targeting right now? Before TV, running for office was much less costly.
One thing I would personally like to see as an election reform is to make primary seasons more compact and less strung out over time. Having the state party primaries strung out as we currently have them leads to placing too much importance on how a candidate runs in the early states, like Iowa and New Hampshire. The distressing result is that candidates may drop out of the race early, well before people in the other states have opportunity to vote on them at all. For example, this year one party began the primary season with 17 candidates. When a number of them didn't do well in the early state primaries, they gave up the race and withdrew. Many of them seemed to be very worthy candidates, very worthy of giving the people of all the states an opportunity to vote for them and to be able to choose from the whole field of candidates.
The long, drawn-out season of campaigning also contributes to the costliness of running for office. One would wish that well-qualified candidates who may not be fabulously wealthy, or who don't already have massive financial backing would be able to run. Maybe shortening the campaign season would help make running for office more affordable. Also, today, we have a greatly worrying level of anger and frustration and negativity among the people regarding elections and our political life in general. This can probably be attributed partly to the stalemate within our national legislative bodies and the blockade mentality among some of our politicians, partly to the sheer difficulties of accomplishing a quick recovery from an economic recession, and other reasons. I have the feeling that the sheer length of the campaign season contributes to people's weariness and generally negative mood, and to the tendency of the campaigns to drift away from debating vital ideas and policies for the country's well-being and over into preoccupation with mud-slinging and demonizing invective.
•••
Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 11/09/2016