By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | While the United States has been focused on campaigning for the presidency all of 18 months, look what took place in Great Britain in the last few weeks.
The English voted by a 52-48 percent margin that they wanted out of the European Union, ready to go on their own. That was June 23. Then the prime minister resigned the next day.
Meanwhile, candidates to replace the former prime minister were falling by the wayside. By July 14 Theresa May was the only candidate remaining, and became the new prime minister. That was only three weeks after the voting that felled the previous prime minister, David Cameron. Ms. May had chosen her new cabinet leaders and was well on her way. She soon was participating in European matters. And there has been little down time in England for in-depth discussion of all that is happening.
Wow! That British government system and leaders can change quickly!
Meanwhile, our country was still sloughing through the run-up to the Republican convention, which ended Friday. Now we face another week of convention bamboozling, this time with the Democrats making the noise. We are still more than three months away from voting for the new president. And he or she won’t take office for two more months after that.
No doubt about it, in our governmental system, we are the turtle, not the hare.
The British speed of getting a new head of government makes the American system seem stodgy and old-fashioned. Yet that’s our method, overtly slow and long-continuing.
Photo by Bill Hawker.
This year it has seen some mighty flips-and-flops in a short time. Some 16 other Republican candidates have seen their presidential hopes vanish, while four Democrats were finding their upward-bound hopes in jeopardy. Now basically two major candidates remain, with the second to get confirmed this week.
All this means that only on August 4 (after the Democratic nomination), will be just the official start of the actual presidential campaign!
Imagine how this long campaign must certainly drain the physical strength of the campaigners and their staffs. It’s a long, long race that not only fatigues the professionals, but the ordinary citizens, too. We are all about bushed from the rhetoric and bashing of the candidates.
The long American campaign has another element: we lack getting much focus on significant news events. The campaign dominates the news cycle. It’s hard to find other interesting, and sometimes most important, stories, except the continuing bombings and shootings. We are all just caught up in the electioneering process.
It makes you wonder will this long campaign this year, with its unusual methods, cause more people than normal to stay away from the polls. Will they be just fed-up with the steady diet of minutia from news media about the candidates, so they will simply not vote? Or will they vote, but not for the major candidates, perhaps the Libertarian, in a show of disgust?
The United States and its democracy, we feel, is the best system to have people govern themselves in the world. Yet getting there is not pretty, and not easy. And that’s just the campaigning, not the governing itself.
Let’s admit it: the system used in England has its merits. It may not be as democratic as we would like it, but it works for them.
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