The news that there are only a scant 400 more days until the 2016 presidential election may strike some as panic-inducing.
Are we really facing more than a year more of Donald Trump’s vague bloviating and Hillary Clinton begrudgingly making late-night appearances on TV comedy shows in an attempt to pretend she has a sense of humor about herself?
Yes. But when you really stop to think about it – isn’t 400 days too little?
After all, Marvel Studios already knows their release slate through 2018, and shouldn’t we as a people take at least half as much time to decide who we’re going to trust with the nuclear codes than some Hollywood studio does to figure out when and where Iron Man is going to pop up next?
That’s why I’m proposing we give it even more time. Let’s take 800 days, instead, and even push back all the primaries as well so we can really feel out this current crop of candidates good and proper.
First of all, this will provide ample time for voters to get to know some of the lesser-known candidates. Did you know there’s a guy named Martin O’Malley running for president? Or Lawrence Lessig – ever hear of him? How do you think those guys feel every time they look up from reading an in-depth exploration of Bernie Sanders’ campaign to see a Sanders devotee complaining that the dynamo from Vermont isn’t getting enough media coverage? Add a year to the process and maybe there will be time to find out!
At 800 more days, the campaign will become a fascinating endurance test. If Trump keeps up his average of two incendiary comments each day for 800 more days, he’ll have to come up with 1,600 more insane things to say! At what point do you think he’ll turn self-deprecating just to buy time? Maybe around day 600? Or maybe never. Maybe he’ll start recycling old Don Rickles jokes, which means it’s possible we might get to hear him refer to Jeb Bush as a “hockey puck”.
How would Bush respond to that? So far his typical response to Trump’s abuse has been to slump like a Mylar balloon left out in the rain. Given 800 more days, though, he could hire some writers and come up with some great zingers to put Trump in his place.
Actually, no. I’m pretty sure that if Jeb Bush found out he was going to have to campaign for over two more years he’d quit on the spot and go take up painting with his brother.
Even with Super Pacs in the mix, 800 more days is going to be tough for the candidates financially. Some of the less well-funded candidates, like, say, Rand Paul, might have to take side jobs to keep in the race.
But maybe that’s good. Maybe Rand Paul should have to work the midnight shift at a 7-Eleven for a few months. After all, he says the conservative movement is about the middle class, so it could only benefit him to actually meet some middle-class people.
Extending the campaign might have drawbacks for some candidates. Given 800 more days, many Bernie Sanders supporters will graduate from college, get jobs, and begin their inevitable slide to the right; the more time people have to really think about the things Ben Carson professes to believe, the more time they’ll have to process what an absolute catastrophe it would be if he were to become the leader of the free world.
That’s the beauty of this proposal, though. Every single person currently vying for the presidency is totally capable of ruining the country, but after 800 days of non-stop campaigning they’ll hopefully be too tired to do any real, lasting damage.
