Is It Over Yet?

I always say I'm going to avoid election coverage and go to the zoo or something, but it's impossible -- I'd have to ask for my own habitat there and just move in. Election coverage is unavoidable, and it's always there -- campaigning starts as soon as someone takes the oath of office.

There's lot of places to point your finger -- politicians who spend their terms campaigning rather than governing, wannabes who are positioning themselves for the next election, a press that's more concerned with process than substance (make that "completely obsessed with process, and forget substance"), and a pundit class who have to have a horse race or no one will pay attention to them, and they have to have attention -- that's why they're pundits, instead of holding down a real job.

Josh Marshall has summarized the ennui that's set in, almost -- he's rather more enthusiastic about it than I can be at this point, but the conclusion's pretty much the same:

One element of this 72 hours or so of compressed and undifferentiated time is that the news cycles — to the extent they exist any more in this new media landscape, which is barely — vanish. It’s one long blur. The candidates and key surrogates move into one breakneck series of appearances that won’t end until tomorrow night. Three days of blur.

It's been months of blur for me, mostly because the choice has been clear since the Iowa caucuses: a sitting president, who has a program and a set of goals for putting the country back on its feet (and I think a lot more attention should be paid to the down-ticket races -- that's going to be the key factor), or any one of a group of interchangeable poseurs who couldn't run a post office in Nowhere, Arkansas.

I'm going to go out and vote Tuesday morning -- my polling place is on the corner -- and then meet a friend for coffee, maybe go to the zoo, and then come home and watch movies. It's like New Year's Eve: it's going to happen, there't not a damned thing I can do about it, so I'll just go with the flow.