So you've got just a few more hours to take part in that great democratic experiment – small "D" – and I hope those of you who can, do. Maybe not repeatedly, as that's illegal.
The grand American electoral process is always a bit of an outsider experience for myself – I'm one of those permanent resident aliens from the Great White North (you know, no hockey, the pipeline that Julia Louis-Dreyfus personally stopped, icebergs, etc.) and as a result, I pay taxes, I get to watch four months' worth of MMA-styled election ads like the rest of you … but I can't vote. So sorry, eh.
Here in Colorado, that's made for a particularly brutal late summer and fall, as more than $800 million was spent by the two parties in an effort to influence opinion in our apparently important swing state.
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By mid-August, most of us here had had enough of it. September was worse. October was absolutely intolerable. It was like the demon stepchild of the Willie Horton-era attack ad had been exposed to Japanese tsunami radioactivity and turned into the most spiteful and wretched blast of lies and counter-lies you'd ever seen. Somewhere, Lee Atwater is smiling.
Both parties. 24-7. No one was innocent. Even low-key candidates out here trying to play it light and folksy (Joe Coors, heir to that well-known Colorado brewing family, for instance) had to ramp things up into a brutally insane game of he-said, she-said.)
We learned to avoid network news for the period. Given Colorado's inexplicably violent and unpleasant year of national news, that may have not been a bad thing, even to steer clear of the campaign ads.
I understand that those will end tomorrow. I may watch NBC and ABC once again. Or maybe I won't.
I will be interested to see the outcome, perhaps later this afternoon or, perhaps drawn out. Infinitely complicated by the fallout from Hurricane Sandy – or Ohio's archaic vote-counting process – or, well, pick your own favorite 11th-hour potential election crisis, sure to be the subject of a Showtime docudrama in 2015.
As has been repeatedly noted, however, maybe when the dust settles, the winner can actually get to work taking care of some of those governing issues that fell by the wayside over the last six months. Or, to take a more cynical view, the 35 percent of a president's four-year term that isn't devoted to being re-elected. You have a curious and expensive system here that we foreigners marvel at.
And maybe when that dust settles, some substantial issues – the fiscal cliff, which threatens to put a serious damper in people's only-just-reemerging ability to put a few more bucks aside monthly to get their retirement planning back on track – might return to focus.
I'd love for there to be some national discussion – or even a moment of collective realization – about the chaotic state of retirement preparedness on the part of such a huge percentage of the population.
I'd love the economy to settle to the point where major public and private pension plans can start paying off those massive funding deficits and address retiree needs, rather than trying to shed their obligations.
Or declare bankruptcy and skip the issue entirely, as those cunning Californians have been doing, albeit unsuccessfully (note to self: do not try to burn CalPERS, ever).
That will come, perhaps, in the next few months. In the meantime, do get out and vote – it's a right you have, one that doesn't come easily. Don't take it for granted.
Wednesday morning epilogue: Wow. Didn't see that one coming.
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