Are You Ready for Election 2024?

For most of my adult life I have been a political optimist. What I mean by this is I never get too excited or disappointed by the outcomes of elections. I have voted for my share of winners and losers over the past forty-five years, but never has an election outcome changed my life. Despite the dire warnings I hear from political partisans during the heat of campaigns, life goes on its merry way even when the bad guy wins. I have the genius of our Founding Fathers to thank for this happy fact. They designed a system of government which is almost impossible to commandeer by any single rouge politician, what with all of its balance of power mechanisms and competing branches of government. Even when someone wins a landslide election, he can’t just ram his agenda through the labyrinth of duplicity which is the United States Congress.(See: Franklin Delano Roosevelt). I remember quite well how many times I was warned by friends and clients of the impending end of the Republic which was guaranteed to happen if Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump or Joe Biden was elected. The Republic survived.

However, with today’s Iowa Caucuses, the 2024 presidential election begins in earnest, and I am dreading it more than any election in my lifetime. 2024 is a busy year for me. I have a lot going on, many things to accomplish, all the while droning on in the background will be the persistent, annoying soundtrack of presidential politics. The leading candidates are 77 and 81 years of age. One shuffles along stumbling and fumbling with his words, his skin having taken on that high shiny gloss of advanced age. The other runs on a platform of revenge and payback for past insults real and imagined, while he’s not appearing in court fending off what seems like 150 lawsuits. If these two ever meet on a debate stage it might be the most embarrassing moment in the history of both television and democracy. If the debate commission opened the broadcast to advertisers, the biggest players would be Viagra and Depends Undergarments.

But…it isn’t funny. None of this is funny. It only seems funny when humor is our only defense against it. No matter where we might stand on the political spectrum, if 2024 gives us a choice between Trump and Biden, we are all losers. Democracy will look like a spent fighter in the fifteenth round trying to hang on to the bell. Our friends will be watching the fiasco unfold and wonder what ever happened to America? Our enemies will be emboldened by the spectacle of two doddering fools vying for control of the world’s biggest and most powerful democracy. The American people will have no one to blame since it will have been us who asked for this matchup.

Although I’m still optimistic by nature and temperament, I am finding less tangible reasons to be so. The 2024 election cycle feels to me like the end of something, and the beginning of something else.