“What if our campaigns were much, much shorter?” Ben Smith asks at Semafor. “The presidential campaign is currently a two-year cycle, which begins just after the prior midterm elections. … [Kamala] Harris is accidentally demonstrating the alternative: She’s the hot new thing in August, riding on vibes and goodwill six months after the Super Tuesday peak of modern campaigns.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we only had to suffer a few short months (maybe even WEEKS) of presidential campaigning every four years?

That’s how it used to be, even in the days before radio, television, and the Internet, when campaigning was limited to the speed of rail transportation and print newspaper coverage. Until the 1970s, candidates often didn’t even announce until well into election years, and it was frequently impossible to know whom political parties would even nominate until their summertime national conventions. Campaigns were autumnal affairs, not multi-year slug-fests.

My main disagreement with Smith’s take is on his idea that the modern American presidential campaign cycle only lasts two years.  In reality, we live (as his piece’s title mentions) in the age of the “permanent campaign.”

By the time a president delivers his (perhaps, and maybe as early as next January, her) first inaugural address, the re-election campaign is already underway, and the campaigns of future opponents or successors are at least gassing up for the long drive.

Barack Obama, for example, clearly launched his 2008 presidential campaign within days of delivering a well-received speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His ascent from the Illinois State Senate to short tenure in the US Senate was more looping campaign ad than regular career move.

President George H.W. Bush’s two sons both stopped by the politics store to pick up governorships, both with obvious intent to generate presidential buzz.

Then there’s Harris, who barely got her US Senate seat warm before swerving into the presidential nomination lane for 2020.

Adoption of Smith’s “compressed schedule” proposal (presidential primaries in July, conventions shortly thereafter) wouldn’t shut down the “permanent campaign” nonsense in and of itself, but it might presage a cultural change in which perpectual “pick me” antics cost, rather than benefit, candidates.

Again, wouldn’t that be nice?

A cautionary note, however:

A shorter campaign season would merely provide a respite from the tiresome pageantry, not a solution to our bigger problems. It wouldn’t necessarily result in better government, even if we define “better” along the lines of Grover Norquist’s moderate prescription (“reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”) rather than in terms of my own root and branch anarchist abolitionism.

As respites go, though, I’d joyously greet an end to the “permanent campaign.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Ah, the tempest teapot of vice-presidential campaigns: Republican veep nominee JD Vance, Senator from Ohio, accuses Democratic veep nominee apparent Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, of engaging in “stolen valor garbage.”

Vance’s allegations seem to involve three components:

First, that Walz retired from the National Guard after 24 years in infantry and artillery jobs, instead of adding another hitch so as to deploy with his unit to Iraq (the unit received its orders two months after he submitted his retirement paperwork).

Second, that while Minnesota’s official government web site described Walz’s rank at retirement as Command Sergeant Major, he actually retired as a Master Sergeant because he hadn’t completed the Sergeants Major Academy while holding the job of (envelope, please) Command Sergeant Major.

And third, that Walz referred in passing to “weapons of war, that I carried in war” in an anti-gun-rights rant. Walz never carried a weapon in war, if for no other reason than that the US hasn’t been — legally/constitutionally speaking — at war since 1945, two decades before his birth. He almost certainly carried, at least, a side arm, during periods when the US military was engaged in combat, even though he didn’t see any himself.

Vance, on the other hand, served one enlistment in the US Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq as a “combat correspondent” who, by his own admission, saw no “combat.” I suspect he carried a weapon in that (pseudo-)war. So valor! Much rifle!

I seldom speak “as a veteran,” but “as a veteran” (and, by the way, a Marine who ran for vice-president 16 years before Vance, appearing on the ballot in Tennessee for the Boston Tea Party), I find this line of gotcha name-calling, and the whole concept of “stolen valor,” boring and silly.

A veteran is just a former government employee who may have held, but didn’t necessarily hold, a job with “kill people” in its description of usual duties. There’s nothing inherently more “valorous” about that than there is to any other government jobs/workfare program; “valor” is a rare individual occurrence, not an automatic attribute of “service.”

As for false or embellished claims as to the character of a veteran’s work, who cares?

Family-friendly version of an old saying: The difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale begins “once upon a time …” while a sea story begins “no kidding, you’re not gonna believe this …”

Neither of these two politicians seems to have embellished his record to any wild degree — if I had a dollar for every “former US Navy SEAL” I’ve met, I’d have more dollars than the number of SEALs who’ve ever existed — and given Vance’s need to nitpick at this level of triviality, I doubt any new bombshells are wired for later detonation.

And if the idea of “stolen valor” bothers you, you’ve got too much time on your hands and probably a tendency toward unjustified grievance. Some idiot wearing an “unearned” Medal of Honor neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg. Get over it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As Americans take August to process the presidential race upheavals of July, the most consequential may prove to be a union leader garnering wild cheers for declaring that “the biggest recipients of welfare in this country are corporations … we must put workers first!”

In the twentieth century, such campaign rhetoric was heard of only at the margins from the likes of Ralph Nader and Eugene Debs, not from any respectable Democrat, let alone a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention. Yet Teamsters president Sean O’Brien draws on enough mainstream discontent to position himself as a counter to “the extremes in both parties,” less than a year after conservatives united against actors’ and teachers’ union strikes.

They’re still a long way from warming to those professions. Another 2024 RNC big shot may have been dubbed “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan, but the lead of the Jordan Belfort-produced turkey Santa With Muscles lacks the star power of Batman and Robin‘s George Clooney.

Meanwhile, when Trump’s running mate JD Vance got the nod from O’Brien for having “the courage to sit down and consider points of view that aren’t funded by big money think tanks,” he wasn’t talking about what Vance learned at Yale. Republicans are as reluctant to laud their candidate’s choice to complete college as Democrats are to take Kamala Harris to task for not speaking out against early 2020s class closures after having been heavy-handed as a prosecutor on kids who skipped school.

An earlier Democratic nominee was distinctly less enthusiastic about imposing educational choices. In a 1988 introduction to John Holt’s How Children Fail, George McGovern noted that he had read the original edition during his 1972 bid and that “a visit to schools in any part of the nation will reveal the same uninspired children and lack of attention to what is being taught of which John Holt wrote.” Given such a status quo, “there is nothing lost and much to be gained in encouraging children to follow their own curiosity about life and to build on their own personal interests.”

The Cato Institute which exemplifies “big money think tanks” for liberals (while getting lip service from big-spending conservatives) reached leftward in 1977 with a denunciation of “schools that promise equal enlightenment [but] generate unequally degrading meritocracy and lifelong dependence on further tutorship” by Ivan Illich in the first issue of Inquiry magazine. They succeeded in getting Anthony Burgess and Noam Chomsky to write for later issues.

In The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, historian Rick Perlstein sees a Reagan “obsessed with preserving the factory system” as his own stardom faded, quipping that “the future champion of individualism and entrepreneurship despised the new, more individualistic, entrepreneurial Hollywood.” Such values, fully compatible with free association, can usher teachers’ unions into an educational environment as far from the longstanding model of a factory-like assembly line as today’s unionized filmmakers are from the dream factory studios of yore — with comparable paydays above scale for popular talent.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “COMMENTARY: When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Times-News [Twin Falls, Idaho], August 8, 2024
2. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], August 8, 2024
3. “What unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Elizabethton, Tennessee Star, August 9, 2024
4. “When unions learn from failure” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, September 4, 2024