The Election Season…

Shannon Bohrer

(2/2016) Just in case you have not been keeping up with the news, there is going to be a presidential election this year. The presidential election years seem to sneak up on me. The political parties have already had several debates and my initial thought, being a very mindful and dedicated person, was to write a few articles on the candidates. If I wrote an article for each candidate I would be able to inform my reading public so they could make informed decisions. It’s not that my reading public is not informed already, but many are like me and they do not pay attention until the election is closer. Paying serious attention to the early candidates is not always useful as many of them will not last.

I started my in depth research by googling 2016 election candidates and to my surprise I found that there are 85 people running for president. Aside from the standard Republicans and Democrats, they include; "third party", "independents", "constitutionalist", libertarians" and "green party" candidates. The well-known standard republicans have thirteen persons running, when I wrote this and that’s after a number of them had already dropped out. The democrats have two well know persons, when I wrote this, and they also have a Mr. Martin O’Malley. Obviously writing one article a month on each candidate is not going to work since I would not finish the series until after the election. Then again, that may not be necessarily a bad thing…

Since writing an article each month on one of the candidates will not work, I’ve decided to just write a general article this month and then more in-depth articles in the future. Possible some of those in-depth articles could also be on the candidates, the upcoming election and what the important issues are.

While the presidential campaigning is in the early stages, there seems to be great interest by the news media. Most of the interest seems to be around one candidate, a very wealthy business person. That candidate has reportedly told a few fibs, untruths and has stretched the facts. When confronted about the untruths, he responds that he is being treated unfairly and everything he said is the truth. When confronted by the news about an incident that no one seems to know about, he told the press that just because they could not find the information does not mean it did not occur. Of course that candidate tells his supporters that you cannot trust the press and that the press has their own "liberal" agenda. What may seem strange to some people is that the more this candidate is accused of fibbing and spreading untruths, the higher he seems to be climbing in the polls.

Another candidate, who was previously very high in the poles, has also been accused of telling untruths and tall tales. However, when the "liberal press", with an "agenda", reported this, his poll numbers dropped. That is confusing since both are accused of the same thing and yet one goes up and the other goes down! The candidate whose numbers dropped is a retired pediatric brain surgeon. I wonder if people just don’t trust brain surgeons as much as they trust business people!

While these two candidates seem to distrust the press, they are not alone. Many of the presidential candidates have told us that we cannot believe what we read in the press, which apparently is sound logic to a large number of people. I don’t think that any of these candidates have referenced me in particular so when they talk about the main stream media, they probably don’t mean to include me. Trust me; you can believe what I write. I would like to vouch for the other writers in this newspaper, but I am not sure that I always believe them. I’m not sure where some of them get their information and references. I am not saying that they are dishonest or un-trustworthy; I am just saying that sometimes you should take what they write with a grain of salt. A healthy dose of skepticism is not always a bad thing, challenging what we know can open our minds.

Another issue with the early campaigning is that many of the candidates have told us that we should not trust the other candidates. I do believe that some of them are just saying things because they want to get elected. If you are running for president against a dozen of your fellow party members, you need a gimmick, something to make you different than the others. I really think that is what many of the candidates are doing; they are just saying things to be different. So, if some of them are saying things just to be noticed, maybe the other candidates telling us not to trust them - are correct. Of course then we have the problem - which ones do we trust?

While the election year is still in its early stages, there is a lot of reporting of the candidates, where they are campaigning and what they are saying. What seems to be missing is the detail(s), of how they will govern. Some of the candidates tell us what they believe and what they will do, as if they are running for the position of King. This also seems to be the year of the outside candidate. The importance of being an outsider is because we are also being told not to trust the government. Even many of the candidates that are in the government are running as "an outsider".

We have been told that we should not trust the insider candidates and we should trust the outsider candidates. We have also been told that we cannot trust the news media, because of the bias of the media and the media’s "agenda." And of course we have also been told that we cannot trust the government. It seems that we are only left with the trust issue of the candidates and that would be the candidates running as outsiders, along with some insiders running as outsiders. And at the same time many of these candidates tell us that is why they are running, to regain the trust of the government. If, they are elected then we can trust the government?

With the trust issue we had the reporting of Politico - Fact that more than seventy five percent of the issues reported by the front runner in one party have been rated false. False includes: "mostly false," "false" or "pants on fire." However, this candidate did warn us not to trust the press…. While the message is simple; don’t trust the government, don’t trust the press and don’t trust the candidates, it can be a little confusing. Did I mention that I am an outside reporter?