I Hate the President

The next one, that is.

This is the really bad effect of the long campaign season--candidates have to talk too damn much and they keep having to answer questions. Before a candidate becomes president, the media demand that they have a proposal for dealing with every imaginable political issue. Once the person becomes president, however, they deal with a set of issues that is a combination of those personally selected and those that are simply unavoidable, but they don't have to talk about all the others.

And it's inevitable that all that talking is going to cause them to say things that diminish our confidence in them. Nobody is going to agree with them on all issues, nor does any one person have the best answers to all issues. (As a consequence, I am consciously relying on heuristics to determine my vote this time around, as the more I think about the candidates' positions the more confused I get about my preference.)

And of course it's a real pisser for whomever gets elected, because he'll have no honeymoon in office--none at all. We already know him too well to give him the benefit of the doubt for a while.

If we could compress our campaign season, this problem would largely solved. Unfortunately, the front-loading of the primary system is a classic case of individual rationality resulting in collective irrationality. There's a good solution being floated--rotating regional primaries--but no good mechanism for moving the states toward it.