Time for an intermission in the perpetual campaign
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A few days ago, I went to a birthday party for a 15-year-old friend of the family. It was held at a place in West Hollywood where everyone gets a small cake and all the materials needed to decorate it. The younger guests came up with some wonderfully whimsical ideas — with the notable exception of one girl whose design featured a knife plunged into her cake and syrupy blood spilling down the side.
Mine was even more scary. I did Donald Trump with bright orange frosting for hair and pink fondant shaped into his nose and lips. (Check it out in the photo above.) A normal person would have turned the cake into something innocent and uncontroversial; perhaps a happy clown. (Although some might argue I did do a clown.) I take this as a sign that I’ve let the 2016 presidential campaign commandeer too many of my brain cells for too long.
There is a feature on Facebook where an image a person posted in his or her timeline 12 months before pops up as a reminder of past fun. Last week, one of my cartoons appeared unbidden in this way. It was a lampoon of the “kids’ table” to which candidates low in the polls were to be relegated for the first Republican presidential debate. By then, we had already been through several months of the many contenders for the Republican and Democratic Party nominations announcing their candidacies, making appeals to wealthy donors and vying for media attention. Now, here we are, 365 days later with nearly five months still to go until the general election.
The amount of time taken up by the presidential campaign is absurd. Effectively, the second half of a president’s four-year term is given over to the process of choosing the person who will get the next four years in the White House. We seem to prefer the game of picking presidents to the more important business of giving them a chance to govern. This system is more twisted than a blood-oozing birthday cake.
Among the few people who benefit from the perpetual campaign are political commentators and cartoonists. For someone with a job like mine, a presidential campaign is like the Super Bowl, the World Cup, the Olympics, the Final Four and the World Series all wrapped up together — a big-stakes competition that goes on almost endlessly. Still, even a cartoonist needs a break, so I’m taking a few days off to rest my drawing hand and my brain.
It would be good for the candidates and good for the country if they could take a break, too. Hillary Clinton needs to rest her overworked vocal cords. Donald Trump needs to stop tweeting and go play some golf. The cable news media need to take time to cover vital stories beyond the campaign horserace. And the rest of America could use a timeout from the overheated rhetoric.
Pardon the pun, but, as election campaigns go, this one really takes the cake. But it won’t hurt to forget about it for awhile. In fact, I’m counting on it being healthy.
Follow me at @davidhorsey on Twitter
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