Please let it end

The presidential election is still several weeks away, but it’s going to seem like an eternity.

This campaign has already lasted longer than the Cold War. I have a proposition for Obama and McCain. I’ll vote for whichever one shuts up first.

No more ads, speeches or photo ops until the election. No debates or pep rallies or whistle-stop tours or YouTube videos. Everybody already knows by this point who they’re going to vote for, anyway.

Watching a political campaign is a root canal without anesthesia. It’s banging your shin on the car door or sliding off your bicycle seat and hitting the bar. (Why did boys’ bikes have that stupid bar, anyway, when girls’ bikes didn’t? I’ll always wonder).

You know what’s coming. The candidates will keep taking shots at each other. McCain’s supporters will paint Obama as being just left of Henry Wallace. Obama’s people will portray McCain as being just right of George Wallace.

Then there will be the stupid staged photo ops. Why do political handlers feel it’s necessary to show their candidates doing everyday things, like windsurfing or shooting basketball or touring a pork rind factory?

They don’t need to show me that the potential president is a regular guy. Larry down at the repair shop who changes my oil and loves NASCAR and always has a toothpick in his mouth is a regular guy. I don’t want Larry to be president.

I don’t need to know that the president is capable of letting loose and having fun. Being president should not be fun. A president should take a no-fun vow for the entirety of his term in office. Didn’t eight years of Bill Clinton teach us that?

Presidents get too much vacation time. Bush took more vacation time than Johnny Carson. I want the president to work at least as much as your average Wal-Mart cashier. Is this too much to ask?

Maybe this sounds a bit harsh, but nobody makes these men, and now women, run for president. It’s a choice. Lewis Grizzard once said that being elected president was like being sentenced to four years of wearing your jockey shorts too tight. I guess we would change that to a girdle if Hillary got elected.

I have a hard time getting fired up for any presidential campaign, because I don’t trust any politician. When I shake hands with one, I always count my fingers afterward.

Most politicians’ promises are as fleeting as a butterfly in a hurricane, and carry about as much weight. I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them, as my mama used to say.

I had some exposure to politicians when I was a newspaper reporter. Several times I interviewed a state Senator named Skin Edge. What great campaign slogans he must have, I thought. Vote for Skin. I’m for Skin. I hear he did well among the uncircumcised.

I’m not really in favor of all of the drives to sign up more people to vote. I think too many people vote as it is. The next time you’re in the self-service line at Kroger, and you see a guy wearing a vintage Winger T-shirt, staring at the screen with wonder and awe, like a wise man staring at the Baby Jesus, as he slides each beer in his 6-pack of Milwaukee’s Best individually across the scanner, which malfunctions because he’s drooling on it – well, just remember, he’s going to help pick the president.

So let’s try to hang on until November, when our long national nightmare will be over. For maybe a year, until the 2012 campaign starts.

I can hardly wait.