Election Check-in: Yep, Still Not Pretty

Imagine with me, if you will, an early Thanksgiving at the Media Outlet house and everyone's coming home, whether they're wanted or not. Just your typical family affair, with every clichéd stereotype represented perfectly: you've got your angry old men of Fox News clasping tightly to their guns ("Grampa Chuck"), your doting middle-aged women of HGN bottling up their emotions ("Aunt Betsy"), your chipper twenty-something yuppies of MSNBC blithely unaware of the real world ("Cousins Susie and Nick"), and Anderson Cooper ("Anderson Cooper"). Everyone's chatting amicably among themselves about this or that, trivial things they don't bother covering in their airtime, like Kim Kardashian, or that new Starbucks around the corner, or Kim Kardashian's butt. Glenn Beck is introducing his plan to fight off Marxism bare-fisted to the lamp in the corner. Katie Couric takes a preening break in the hallway, checking her hair in the mirror before rejoining the crowd. Add a strong black transvestite matriarch and you've got a scene straight out of the ending of a Tyler Perry movie, the part right before the credits when all the shenanigans have died down and he's biding his time for a sequel. 

Suddenly, the idyll is broken. A frightened hush settles over the house, like an invisible scary cloud settling over a different but nevertheless similar-looking house. There's a knock at the door; when everyone pretends to not hear it, the door is knocked a second, harder time. The collected journalists and pundits jump at this "hello" in the violent dialect of sign-language, and all jump again --except George Stephanopoulos, who hasn't stepped off the ground since 2005-- when the hand responsible for the knocking creates and subsequently bursts through a splintered hole in the door. It feels around the door for a second, searching for the knob with its touch like a giant blind hand-spider. Upon finding the knob, the manual arachnid wrenches it right and unlocks the door. The hand withdraws and the door slowly opens with a creak, revealing the owner of the hand to be a monstrous, ginger hunchback with only one functioning eye. Joe Scarborough shits his pants.
For a good three seconds the cyclopean abomination surveys the huddled and glassy-eyed reporters, clearly savoring the theatricality of his entrance...but then the spell is broken. The assorted newspeople are no longer scared. They begin to whisper among themselves, pointing and giggling at the enormous, unfortunately red-headed person in the doorway. The phrases "needs to buy two plane tickets" and "can't donate sperm" are tossed around. Someone even throws in "poor depth perception," which is met with a hearty snicker. As the insults pile on, the behemoth with the spider-like hands simply stands in the doorway and accepts the barrage. A single tear rolls down its face (it would be two tears, one from each eye, but, you know, only one eye works).
Now, if that story were to be real or just a movie, that gigantic malformed human being would probably just be Wolf Blitzer's long-lost illegitimate child from a college affair with Diane Sawyer, and then the oeuvre would switch from Tyler Perry to more along the lines of Adam Sandler, who, in a shocking cinematic shakeup, would play both Wolf Blitzer AND Wolf Blitzer's facial hair. However, it is neither real nor an unwarranted sequel to That's My Boy; it's simply a story to drive home a point. 

The elephantine redheaded stepchild in the room is, to bring some closure to this extended metaphor, the 2012 Presidential Election. It's huge, it's ugly, it demands attention and no one really wants to talk about it.
Oh, sure, everybody will talk about it, but they're not really talking about it; they're just saying stuff in its general direction. They're spritzing the flames, not putting out the fire. They'll say, oh, so-and-so bent the truth a little bit I picked TV personalities because they're more instantly recognizable, but internet newspeople, this is on you too. What are you guys doing out there? You smell bullshit, you call it. That's how the game works.
Okay, okay, maybe I should lay off individual reporters. It's not really their fault, all they're doing is trying to not lose their jobs over something stupid. They've got understandable priorities; I, on the other hand, have no horse in the employment race and can say what I want. No one will read it, of course, but I can still say it. So let's talk about what the hell is going wrong here.
 Probably the biggest part of this year's election, different from previous years, is the explosion of negative advertising, or as the British call it, "talkin' smack." This is easily the most worrisome part of the Blitzer Baby. Negative ads shift  the way the race works: instead of trying to prove why they deserve to be elected, politicians are now just saying why the other person is bad, and doesn't deserve to be. Sometimes it's super-effective, like Charizard's Fire Blast against a Grass-type, and sometimes it hurts both opponents. Obviously this is not the first campaign where negative ads have been used, but it's undoubtedly the first to use as many as both sides do, which is approximately a lot.

As well as the first to use a Pokemon metaphor.

Each campaign equally embodies at least half of the Blitzer Baby's negative advertising aspect, and neither really can be blamed for much more than half of it. While that may sound like a cop-out answer seeking to avoid offending one side or another of the country, that's because it is, but also because it's the one that fits best. Perhaps the GOP started, but Obama has joined in wholeheartedly. (I could easily go into how the rise of all this negative advertising coincides with the rise of Super PACs post-Citizens United and how with one fell swoop a conservative Supreme Court changed the way American politics will function from now on but I won't for the sake of your sickeningly low attention spans, so, you're welcome.)
The best way I can envision it is two seven-year-old boys on a playground fighting over a girl: even though calling each other names and then retaliating against that name-calling with more name-calling ad infinitum won't get you very far, since the other one started it, it's okay to keep doing it, and hey, maybe if I call him "poopface" enough she'll realize that I'm the one who really deserves her undying love. It's a tiring way to battle, moreso for the seven-year-old girl (i.e., voters) being fought over who are forced to watch it all. I'm not suggesting that the campaigns are run by second-graders, but sometimes it seems they're run with similar tactics, feeding the damned vicious cycle of  "Well, he said this!" "Oh yeah? Well he said something that out of context seems a lot worse!" "He hates poor people!" "He hates everybody!". It's admittedly funny to use their own ideas in jest, but I'd rather not have such usable fodder at all. Let's stick to facts, people.
Speaking of people: no one has any excuse, in this day and age of a little company called Google, to be unaware of the beliefs and positions of either candidate. Or any political candidate, ever. Not sure what Romney said during his time as Governor of Massachusetts about health-care reform? Oh hey, Wikipedia, thanks for the info and the sources listed at the bottom of the page to back it up. I found that in less time than it takes to microwave a hot dog for ten seconds. In fact, I could have searched for Romneycare almost three times in a row before the hot dog would be mildly lukewarm. So please, ye unwashed masses, washed masses, masses about to take a shower, heed this advice before jumping into a political argument guns blazing: take literally thirty seconds and read up on what you're talking about. Thirty seconds, maybe a minute, tops. Obviously, don't do this in the middle of a conversation, because rudeness is up there with ignorance, but knowing your candidate and his/her opponent's real views can add a little well-needed sanity to the world.

And you'll get a hot dog from it.

Another problem: there doesn't seem like there can be a good, clean ending to this fight. For better or for probably worse, the US is so partisan-ly split right now that the entire presidential race is coming down to a fight for nine swing states. That's all that will determine the next president. You math nerds have probably figured out that's nine out of fifty, but let me put it in simpler terms for those of us who aren't total dweebs: it's like, if two people were sharing fifty apples, and they each got a certain number, and they were just squabbling over the last nine. We all clear? Good. This narrowing of the field of battle could be viewed as vaguely bisexual, in that it can go either way. It allows the candidates to focus their efforts upon these so-called battleground states, which are in this election many of the states facing the biggest issues, economically, politically and socially speaking, but it also means a focus on, in dweeb terms, nine out of fifty states, a focus that completely ignores the rest of the country, and especially excludes states with low numbers of electoral votes, like Montana. Even though it's more cows than people up there, it's still part of the US of A and deserves its fair share of stump speeches, or as the British call them, "bangers and mash."
Only three major, nigh unsolvable problems facing this election as we enter the home stretch...not too shabby. In 54 days, the people will turn out for the only thing that really matters in this whole shindig (actually voting) and we will see how well all of this worked.

And that, in summation, is how the election is going: like a giant, retarded baby. Wouldn't it be better if they settled this the old-fashioned way and simply duked it out already, mano a mano?
Just a suggestion.