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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Time for a breather about 2012

It seems that the media just cannot help itself. They have to write about the 2012 presidential race and discuss who is ahead and who is behind. The real truth is that there is not much of a race going on yet. The media is just rying to stir things up so that they can have something easy to write about. We are just ending May of the year prior to the election. There are oodles of time left for a candidate to push to success or fall from the heights. I went back to 1991 to look at numbers in May of that year and found that George H.W. Bush had an approval rating of 75% in May of that year. Presidential candidate Bill Clinton had the support of 1% of all Democrats who were polled in California and Florida during that same month. That's right, Clinton was totally unknown and had no support and Bush looked completely unstoppable.

Four years ago at this time, the inevitable race between front runners Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton was shaping up in the press. We all remember how that race went.

The point is that most of the speculation about presidential candidates is unimportant since very, very few people are yet paying attention. I realize that I too have talked about the shape of the race, but enough is enough. There is just too much that the USA has to deal with for us to be distracted with the nonsense of campaigning a year and a half before the election.

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