Quit whining about the long presidential campaign

There is no serious case that the length of the presidential campaign harms our ability to choose our leaders wisely. The implicit argument is that long elections fail to entertain us properly. Somehow, despite our ability to rot our brains with an infinite number of TV channels, web videos and cat GIFs at our fingertips, we demand the reality TV show otherwise known as the presidential campaign be cancelled as soon as possible.

My fellow Americans, I’m so terribly sorry that our elections are so boring. But there’s this thing called “vetting,” and you’ll be sorry if we don’t do more of it.

If our election season were only 45 days, Donald Trump might already be president before anyone could learn about his egregious flip-flops and dubious business endeavors. Ross Perot, whose 1992 campaign theme song was “Crazy,” was briefly the frontrunner and could have snuck in as well on a wave of his own money.

“Pretty much everything that’s rotten with presidential campaigns — from the obscene sums spent by candidates to the relentless character-assassination of political ads — is a function of their interminable length,” argues Jacoby. But that doesn’t wash. Campaigns could still raise tons of money and saturate the airwaves and the Internet with low blows in a shortened election season. We would just have less time to fact-check them.