Post Obama

     The nation will have a new president in January 2017, which means the election will be in November 2016, some thirteen months off.  The political season these days actually stretches through the whole calendar year, or so it seems, with no time off for candidates or voters to catch their breath.  It's exhausting for everyone.  The more so if you happen to watch television news featuring talking heads screaming at one another.  Partisan politics has become a full-contact blood sport, not for the faint of heart, either those running and serving or those voting and hoping for the best.
      The energy-sapping futility of it all is suggested by a set of statistics published recently, most notably that five billion dollars is about to be spent to sway ten percent of the voters in a handful of "swing states."  That's astounding.  Think of all that energy about to be spent.  And the frantic spending.  And the media feeding-frenzy.  It's not going to be pretty--though in all honesty, if you can keep your head, it may be very entertaining.
     There are other crazy numbers.  As for example that no matter who runs and no matter what platforms they run on, forty-five percent of the people will vote straight Democrat and forty-five percent will vote straight Republican.  What's left is the ten percent of undecided voters in the so-called "swing states" who are up for grabs. And as only little more than fifty percent of the total voting age population actually voted in the last presidential election, all that time and money will be spent on five percent of the voters in the swing states--and they tend to be located in a handful of counties and often along a stretch of interstate connecting major cities, like the I 4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando..
     Maybe we should just hold the national presidential election in those swing counties in the eight or nine swing states.  None of the rest of us seem to matter.  And we wouldn't have to put up with the unfolding political circus over the next full year.  And maybe we could use four and a half of the five billion dollars on things that really matter.  Fill in the blank with your favorite charity.