Presidential race is just more Reality TV

[Alan Cottrill]

lately my frontal lobe goes numb every time I hear a 30 second news blurb stating something one of the presidential candidates has said or not said or done or not done. this is probably because I know the someone I interact with heard this blurb and will want to discuss/debate it, and then I start to get a shooting pain right behind my right eye. These people are discussing presidential politics just like they discuss what happened on Survivor or The Apprentice last night. And just like the news stories and the rhetoric tossed around by both sides there is no substance to their arguments. When I get trapped into these water cooler discussions my approach is to ask questions. The stammering and stuttering and topic changing answers I get are what start the headache right behind my left eye. It seems like everyone has 20 seconds of talk on any given subject but as soon as you ask them who, what, when, where, why and how they go dumb, because that wasn't discussed on whatever episode of "The Presidential Race" they watched. they just got the topic sentence, no supporting information.

I accept that I am grossly uninformed about the details of all the Issues being debated by the presidential candidates. I know the issues, but since there is no easily accessible outlet for details on the issues and I do not want to spend my time researching these issues I choose to be under informed.

Lately I have concluded that the president has all the power to recommend change, but very little power to effect change. so It really doesn't matter who the president is, because it is the slow churning of all branches of government that make change. The president is just the guy who takes the heat when ***** goes wrong. it seems like the primary way he takes the heat is when journalists, scrambling to fill the space between the commercials, blame the administration for what ever bad news they're reporting, be it the economy, job growth, the war on terror. "president bush's jobless recovery" "president bush's net job loss" Every time someone wants to discuss issues like these I always ask "how does the president directly affect (insert issue here)" and that's where the stammering and stuttering comes in. It's not like I know, but they don't know either so we might as well discuss who got cut from the apprentice last night because we both know about that.

sorry for the rant, just had to get it off my chest.

[lendaddy]

Originally posted by Alan Cottrill

Lately I have concluded that the president has all the power to recommend change, but very little power to effect change. so It really doesn't matter who the president is, because it is the slow churning of all branches of government that make change. The president is just the guy who takes the heat when ***** goes wrong. it seems like the primary way he takes the heat is when journalists, scrambling to fill the space between the commercials, blame the administration for what ever bad news they're reporting, be it the economy, job growth, the war on terror. "president bush's jobless recovery" "president bush's net job loss" Every time someone wants to discuss issues like these I always ask "how does the president directly affect (insert issue here)" and that's where the stammering and stuttering comes in. It's not like I know, but they don't know either so we might as well discuss who got cut from the apprentice last night because we both know about that.

Don't sell yourself short, that is an excellent synopsis of the way it goes. I am a political junkie and have been for years yet your conclusion is right out of an article I just wrote. Very few Presidents get the opportunity to really affect change, even fewer take advantage.