Recently, I’ve found myself more and more intrigued by the races for party candidacy. I feel like I’ve immersed myself in these primaries and caucuses – I tune in to CNN and Fox News every day to see the latest news on each of the candidates. What I have realized though, as ironic and obvious as it sounds, is that political analysts “analyze” too much. I mean, I know that that is what they are paid to do – but they seem to misconstrue or exaggerate every spoken word or action that any candidate makes. I mean, sometimes, you don’t have to read between the lines and think that every statement or action has some political ramification to it. Another thing that twerks me is the backlash that a candidate will receive when they work with the opposing party on a bill or a law. McCain is being criticized as not being conservative enough and siding with the Democrats on opposing the Bush Tax Cuts. So what?

This whole party affiliation bullshit is really starting to annoy me. I know that republicans like to stick together and so do democrats – and they probably should, but why does party affiliation have to get in the way of progress? Why must a candidate be chastised for sharing a common viewpoint with the opposing party? Bipartisanship should not be this hard to achieve.

Let me not get too high on my horse though – I myself have become drawn in to all this political propaganda. I find a lot of this highly fascinating – it makes me wonder why I haven’t developed a greater interest in politics until now.

I guess politics can be a lot like sports. In sports, as in politics, the analysts tend to over analyze way too much and give too much coverage to a non-issue and sometimes not enough to the real issues. For example, there has been so much media coverage on the race between race and gender, but I don’t know how much of an issue that is. America, as justified by polls, is ready to have a black president or a woman president. It doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal, but the media is giving it a lot more coverage than it probably should merit. White voters, for the first time ever, are taking a backseat in these early stages of primaries.

Maybe I’m just too damn simple. Maybe I see resolution where others see conflict – I don’t know. But this whole democrat-republican rivalry (and it is that) just doesn’t make complete sense to me. I thought the point of getting elected to public office was to progress the country, not to progress one’s party aspirations. I know that I’m being naive, and I understand that it does NOT WORK that way, but I guess my new found interest in politics has me questioning a lot of things.