An objective observer, if there is one, of the presidential campaign currently underway has to conclude that more care and attention are given to choosing a football coach than to the selection of a president to lead the nation and, as fate would have it, the world. No alumni association would stand for an athletic department considering a coach who has inadequate experience or no experience at all on the field as successful player or coach, or hiring one without extensive interviews to determine his qualifications and potential strategies for winning games.
Presidents evidently don t have to meet such exacting standards.
Whereas presidential candidates once made lengthy speeches in town halls, at outdoor rallies or on radio that were reported and printed verbatim in newspapers the next day, all for digestion, examination and discussion by the public, they now find it more suitable, when they are not busy soliciting campaign contributions, to limit themselves to 30-second sound bites, one or two scripted monologues that are repeated with little or no change to audience after audience, and interviews by interviewers considered likely not to be unfriendly. Candidates and their campaign managers are not the only ones to blame. They have combined to render the process more comic than serious, which may be acceptable to many during good times but could be disastrous in an economic downturn. Everyone wants to be first and thereby seem to set the pace for the entire nation. Two states, Iowa and New Hampshire, managed to carve that position out for themselves and work diligently and relentlessly to preserve it, because, aside from the ego and pride involved, it has by now become an industry for them.