Saturated

Vernuft at The New Skeptic has had enough of this election. Me too. It's easy to say that it's saturation has everything to do with the machinations of two of the self-styled agents of change of the Democratic Party. Thanks to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, people were talking about this election long before they really should have, or so we like to say.

That's a fair enough assessment which holds a kernel of truth: Obama and Clinton knew that their campaigns would need to be quickly off the mark in order to capitalize on the ever-slowing decay of the GOP. They also knew just what kind of beast their opponent was, and so the race to win the hearts of the disaffected electorate and the mainstream media, which was once decidedly pro-Clinton, was launched months, if not a year, before official campaigning began.

But I like to think that it just wasn't the Obama or Clinton's power grab, or the media's hard-on for Democratic candidates. I think the weakness of the Presidency, from mid-2005 to early 2007, had as much or more to do with the saturation than anything the Democrats did. My idea follows as such: Since the Republicans were in a state of disarray, they quickly became a side-show the much more positive developments in the Democratic Party. It wasn't that there was a vast, left-wing conspiracy - people just don't like hearing about the collapse of one political party, whose members were breaking rank and back-stabbing each other just to retain a modicum of a positive public image. The catastrophes of Mark Foley, Larry Craig and Jack Abramoff aren't exactly the type of news most people like to hear about everyday.