Nick Jimenez

Sunday, November 28, 1999

We're not ready for the political season

The Christmas shopping season is now finally officially underway, preceded, as always, by the complaints that the merchandising push is beginning much too early.
   I too could whine about the Christmas drum-beating pushing aside Thanksgiving, Halloween and even edging up on Labor Day.
   But any resistance seems just about futile now. When you see Christmas icicle lights go on sale in October, it's time to wave the white flag.
   But the Christmas shopping calendar is practically on sun-dial speed compared to the political time line.
   I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I think I saw the first political campaign sign about the Fourth of July.
   Most of the sane world is just now focusing on the holidays, New Year's resolutions and trying to figure out if there's enough champagne stocked away for the big millennium event. But for the political junkies for whom the campaigning never ends, the 2000 election is practically at the midway point.
   Incredibly, the official Texas political calendar kicks off on Friday, the first day that candidates can file for office. Of course, candidates for local political offices have already been running for weeks, and in some cases, even months.
   I think of myself as something of a political junkie. I read political news like some people read "Entertainment Weekly." I still get excited on Election Night as the returns start coming in, and resent the day that computers started predicting the winners shortly after the second voter gets out of the ballot box. OK, I'm blowing that out of proportion: it's the third voter.
   But not even the most avid political junkie, no matter how voracious for political tidbits, could want a political calendar that begins before the first Christmas Posada.
   And if that's not bad enough, the filing deadline occurs just about the time that all those New Year's funny hats and empty champagne bottles will be going in the trash, on Monday, Jan. 3.
   Of course, the national political calendar never actually stops. The presidential candidates have been running since Clinton got sworn in for the second term. And the race really got started in earnest when Clinton finished that speech about never ever having sex "with that woman."
   The 2000 presidential primary season will be practically over before Spring Break. That's because of the rush of primaries at the beginning of the year. But that's national presidential politics where there's so much money involved that it takes all those months of campaigning simply to spend all the millions raked in in campaign contributions.
   But a nearly-year-long campaign for justice of the peace? With early voting in the Texas primaries beginning on Feb. 28, Primary Election Day on March 14 and General Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 7, can the public sustain that much interest for so long in any of the local political offices?
   The abysmal voter turnout percentages in the most recent elections say they can't.
   We used to get a break in primary political campaigning until spring. That's when the primaries used to be held in May and June. That was before Texas got a case of the big head and thought it could influence presidential politics by moving up the primary elections.
   As we all know, our votes have really determined who runs for the parties' banners, right?
   It's seems almost like ancient history to remember a day when politics got the starter's gun on Labor Day. Politics still gets started on Labor Day - just a year earlier.
  

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  © 1999 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.