Presidential Political Politeness (more or less)

Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

This has allowed the self professed prognosticators, oracles of political wisdom, soothsayers, tea leaf readers and pundits in general to declare that Mitt Romney will be the Republican standard bearer in the presidential campaign against President Barack Obama.

Remove for a moment from this discussion the irrefutable fact that there is absolutely nothing contained in the Constitution that provides for a two party monopoly  on presidential candidacies, and that there are also no guidelines provided with our foundational document for dictating how said campaigns should be presented to the American electorate.

The people, however, have already been inundated with such nonsense as the election being a referendum on a mythological ‘war on women’, a ‘war on working mothers’, and that the respective candidates have a myriad of silliness attached to their records in public office.

The major media outlets have also begun their sycophantic alignments to their respective ideological dogma in an attempt to provide the greatest amount of imbecilic coverage and obfuscations so that their chosen candidate can deflect any attempt at an honest campaign dialogue with the American electorate.

As ridiculous as all of the political theater of the absurd seems to Americans this year, it is critical to consider two possible alternatives to this ritual of idiocy.

The first is to remember that the transfer of power does indeed take place at the ballot box. There are no tanks in the street, no protests where citizens are murdered at the whim of those in power. We may cringe at how our political election process is perceived by the world, but it is important to keep in perspective  that it is indeed able to be seen by the world, and not cloaked in dictatorial or tyrannical secrecy.

The other situation to ponder is that the character assaults between the two major camps could actually escalate to charges so outlandish as to be so wholly unbelievable by the electorate and such an embarrassment to the stature of this beacon of liberty.

Consider the potential charges that could be made between the two political candidates.

They could, and these are not being assigned to either party specifically but rather attributable to the campaign process at large, level the following charges:

That one candidate’s wife was a bigamist.

One candidate executed members of the army.

One candidate was a murderer.

One candidate procured American women to serve as prostitutes for a foreign monarch.

One candidate used taxpayer funds for gambling devices in the White House.

One candidate had used political prowess to steal a presidential election from the true winner.

If the potential for such charges seems far-fetched, these were but a few of the charges flying back and forth during the Andrew Jackson/John Quincy Adams election of 1828.

So if the current political debate climate seems to be amongst the ‘worst in history’, remember it has a way to go to rival some previous presidential contests, and that fact should reassure America that however outlandish our electoral process may appear to the rest of the world, the ridiculous has helped us endure and prosper for more than two hundred and twenty years, and that is something to be both envied and to be proud to present to ourselves and to our posterity.