Pssst...

Hey. C’mere.

Just between you and I, while there are a lot of people raging against the guy, will you admit how irrelevant the President is in our lives?

I seem to see a lot of electronic ink devoted to the topic regularly. Anger, anger, anger all directed at Alfred E. President but, I get the feeling sometimes like the nation is just holding its breath waiting for the next election to roll around so we can put this 8 years behind us.

8 years, wow!

Between Bush the senior, Clinton and Bush the Jr. that’s 20 years of my life gone. It’s hard to sometimes imagine a generation is coming of age and that is all they have known. Stop for a second and really give that some thought if you will. If a person was born in 1988 all they have known is a Bill sandwiched between a lot of Bush - seems like a healthy stripper metaphor is in there.

Even if they were born say around ’84, they can’t really have very clear memories of anyone before those three.

I imagine age gives you perspective, the first guy I can really remember was Nixon and I have vague memories of Johnson and his veep Humphrey (who ran against Tricky Dick in ’68). I survived Ford and Carter though both of whom I remember quite well and of course, Ronnie Rocket.

What I wonder about right now is the wave of nostalgia twenty years hence for the ‘good old days’ of the decade just after the millennium. It’s only in looking back we get a sense of the events we have lived through, we never seem able to recognize those trends while we are living them. What will the focus be on I wonder?

In the meantime, will somebody tell me why, oh why we are having debates between prospective candidates 15 to 16 months before any actual election takes place? By focusing so readily on the next presidential race, aren’t we in fact giving a pass to the people who are in office now in both the Executive and Legislative branches of government? Am I the only one who thinks this sideshow devoted to figuring out who the horses will be in the next Presidential race only serves to distract the country from taking care of the things it needs to address today?