Despite What Trump Says, This Country’s In Good Shape.

I just spent about 30 minutes looking at various polls and polling analyses, and what I take away from the whole business is not so much that the contest is still essentially tied, but that the real campaign is going to start up next week.

Why next week? Because that’s when the kids start going back to school. And if my experience as a parent of three, and the experiences of other parents, including my three children all of whom are now parents is any guide, the summer months are basically spent waiting for school to begin again.

Of course, if you don’t yet have children or if like me your kids are grown and gone, then at least in theory you should have time even in the summer months to think about the Presidential campaign and how you’re going to vote.

But that’s in theory. The reality is that most adults don’t think about voting to any great degree until maybe a week or so before the election takes place. And the reason for that lack of interest in politics until right before the election has to do with the simple fact that with a couple of exceptional events, like 9–11 or Covid-19, the United States happens to be not only a very stable country in political terms, but a country in which the way you are living more or less at the beginning of the year is the way you’ll be living when the year comes to an end.

Example: I held full-time jobs from 1971 until 2012. Over that forty-one-year period, I was on seven different payrolls, five were…