Tag Archives: primary election

Primary colors…

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When I voted for the first time, I was so excited that I could hardly contain myself. Low, this decade and a half later, I’m beginning to notice a slightly disturbing trend. Not only do I get less enthused about every passing election, but for as long as I can remember, my Primary track record has been adorned exclusively by losers. That’s not a personal attack or a judgment statement. I’ve voted for an eventual loser of the Republican nomination in every primary election since 1996. Don’t try to figure out if that says more about me or the party. It says plenty about both of us.

Still, out of some misbegotten sense of having a voice in the process, I schlepped to the polling place today after work, stood in line for a few minutes, and then cast my vote for a guy who’s sure to be well out of the race by the end of the month. It’s my own little tradition… Like fireworks on the 4th of July or dreams of a white Christmas… If it’s primary day, I’m off to go vote for a guy who will probably never be on another ballot in either of our lifetimes. On the bright side, at least the ballot is full of people for state and local office that I’ve never heard of before. With me, anything below the POTUS nominee race is pretty much a role of the dice based on what information I can scavenge up a day or so before walking into the booth. It’s the only part of primary day that’s even remotely interesting (and I use “interesting” in a very general kind of way).

We’ve been doing this for more or less 226 years. You’d think by now we’d have come up with a better process. Quaint as it is, it’s probably time for our election system to wander out of the 18th century and in the general direction of the 21st. Seriously, why isn’t there an app for this?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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By popular demand, I’m pleased to post the 15th installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week. I promise, unless I’m cut down by another bout of the sickness, that I’ll do my best to keep up with it as a regular feature.

1. Primary Elections. The field of potential candidates starts out vast, but by the time a state with a real population gets around to voting the field has already shrunk to just a handful. By the time the great State of Maryland gets around to holding its primaries on April 3rd, it’s a pretty good bet that the field will have already narrowed down to one. Letting the party unite behind a single candidate early is great… for the candidate and for the party. It’s pretty crummy for the voters, though. If we can all agree that our national general election day is always going to be the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, surely we can come up with a similarly convoluted methodology for holding primary elections all on the same day. So, you know, my vote here in Maryland is worth as much as the ones cast in New Hampshire or South Carolina. I’ll hold my breath waiting on that good idea to take hold.

2. Sub-freezing Weather. Sure, I know everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it. This is a blog after all, so it’s only real mission in life is to serve as a voice box for all the bitching and complaining I can come up with… Which is why I’m going to announce my official opposition to temperatures anywhere below 32 degrees. The only purpose of being that cold is to enable snow production and if there’s not going to be snow (and the accompanying day off from work), then it has no business being below freezing. There. I said it.

3. Ground Coffee. I’d be willing to say that my daily intake of coffee is probably higher than the average person, but that’s a topic for a different discussion. All I really want is just to be able to buy a pound of ground coffee. I don’t want a 12 ounce package, or God forbid, the 10.5 ounce size that I almost picked up. One pound of coffee gets me exactly through one week. It’s the perfect proportion of requirement to availability. 10.5 ounces, on the other hand, gets me to about Wednesday… for the same price I was paying for a full pound back in the “good old days”… You know, four or five years ago. I’m sure someone ran a focus group and said people would rather get a smaller size for the same cost than get the same size for a greater cost, but what that didn’t take into account was the people in that focus group were apparently morons. Seriously. Just give me a pound of coffee and if you have to charge me $12 instead of $8, I’ll live with that. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that decreased supply means increased price and with the notion that inflation drives up the price of everything over time. Trying to pull a slick one with packaging, though, just makes you look like a bunch of tools.