Are Political Campaigns Starting Too Early?

Long ago the political campaign season was short. Candidates were chosen at the party conventions--- often a compromise candidate that had to be persuaded to run. They ran a hard quick fight and then were done with it.

Fast forward to the election of 2008. Candidates announced earlier than ever before. Hillary Clinton was known to be in the running before the 2004 campaign was over, and Obama supporters also started early. The early bird gets the political worm.

And now, the 2012 election campaign has already begun. Only a day or two after the election, news reports were out about the formation of groups supporting Sarah Palin in 2012. There are numerous Palin 2012 web site springing up.

Many of these are revamped 2008 campaign sites, such as Team Sarah. Team Sarah is a social networking site which has 58,000 members and is running a membership drive to increase that to 100,000 by election day.

There are also the bloggers of the Read My Lipstick campaign, which continues to function as bloggers revamp from Sarah for veep in 2008 to Sarah for prez in 2012. And there is the Draft Palin for President 2012 site which was featured on CNN news.

The other side of the political aisle is also in on the trend. There are a few sites beginning to pop up supporting a future run by Hillary Clinton, and perhaps other potential candidates have supporters who are similarly jumping the gun.

So--- now the election campaigns begin the day after the previous election. Is that good or bad? In such a long campaign, people may get bored with the candidates long before election day. On the other hand, the long campaigning season gives candidates time to build up grassroots support.

But where will the trend lead? Is it possible for campaigns to get even longer than this? In that case we will be having two political campaigns running at once for part of the time. If the campaigning season ever goes to eight years, we'll have two campaigns going all of the time. Is America ready for that? I think I liked the old ways better--- yet nevertheless, I'm working for my own 2012 candidate already. Maybe you should be, too.