I think it's a great idea to make election cycles shorter, for the reasons you mention plus giving those elected more time to govern and less time getting ready for the NEXT election. Not too confident it will happen, though.


>Hello Mike,
>
>I do not have a source to confirm this at the moment, but I believe the US is way ahead in the spending game of any country. I believe most other countries have a much shorter election cycle. I am already tired of the political crap and the primaries are still a ways off. We need to have a much shorter political cycle, six months start to finish max, it would be harder to collect or spend hugh amounts of cash in that time frame. I bet this election will top $1Billion easy, starting to be real money.
>
>Bob
>
>>This is not just a U.S. thing, as I'm sure you also know. See Thomas's post about Germany. I was just reading an article about the recent French election; same thing there.
>>
>>The concept that every citizen has exactly equal say and influence is a nice one but that's all it is, a concept. A nice vision for Pollyannas. We have some reasonable safeguards in place to try to prevent the worst abuses, but money is always going to make itself heard. We couldn't keep it completely out of politics even if we wanted to.