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In the art of politics and government in a republic, there are necessarily periods of electoral contest.  Yet as decision-points, they are not meant to be of a considerable duration, particularly relative to that of governing.  The reason is that the function of elected representatives is to govern. When the interstices because the duration, and the duration becomes the interstices, one can expect popular fatigue from incessant fighting and frustration from a lack of attention on governing. Electoral campaigns are a means to a further means, that of governing, which is in turn a means toward whichever goals government is established to achieve for a society. It may be that the American citizenry is too prone to relish the fights of a campaign while evading the civic responsibility of keeping informed on the governing. One can see in political discussions on television that policy alternatives tend to give way rather quickly to sideline "issues" that are more tantalizing but less on point.  For example, during the health-insurance debates in 2010, the question of whether there should be a government alternative to private health insurance companies quickly gave rise to "discussions" on death-panels and whether Barak Obama is a socialist. For whatever reason, it is difficult for us to stay on point where governing is concerned; our attention is too easily swayed by campaign-like fights.

So I was not surprised to read on roughly the two-year half-way point of President Obama's first term that he would shortly close the office of political affairs at the White House in order to prepare for his re-election campaign, which was shortly to start building a fund-raising and grass-roots operation based in Chicago. Lest one be led to believe that this move is geared to giving governing some room from the pressure of campaign politics, the move coincided with the arrival of David Plouffe, who managed the president’s 2008 campaign, in the West Wing as a senior adviser. Coincidentally, the President was planning to begin engaging in day-to-day campaign activity, including fundraisers, in late spring--just a few months into the second half of his term of office.  In other words, out of a four year term, half of it--two years--is in campaign mode. This does not go along with the idea of a campaign "season."  Moreover, it treats the selection-process as more of an on-going activity rather than a decision-making point in time. I don't see much real change in the president's approach to politics and governing; in fact, it seems to me that he is merely perpetuating the encroachment of the campaign "season" onto the duration that is meant for governing, or doing the people's business. Perhaps this is akin to the Christmas advertising season.  First it overtook Thanksgiving, then it overshot Halloween. Now Christmas displays are up in some stores in September. Consumers enable the merchant's behavior by taking the bait.  Likewise, I believe we have been unwittingly enabling our representatives to draw us into their campaign fights because we can't seem to resist the excitement of it. Ignoring the early campaigning and telling our representatives to focus more on governing is comparatively bland.

A crucial difference between representative and direct democracy is that in the former governance is delegated to representatives. In other words, the citizenry is not obliged to remain engaged once governance again takes over after an election. Yet this does not mean that the citizenry must take the bait when some representatives are tempted to divert from governance by starting the next election cycle too early. Campaigning early might be in their particular self-interest, but is it in ours? Perhaps the underlying question is whether a representative democracy necessarily sinks to the lowest common denominator, or whether a citizenry has the requisite impulse control to maintain the viability of the political system by calling its representatives to account--holding them to the fire, as it were, to govern between elections. It is essentially a matter of what the citizenry values: the duration wherein representatives govern or the titilating excitement of a childish fight at the expense of governing. The funny thing about a republic is that what we observe in our representatives can be a reflection of ourselves.  We blame them exclusively at our own folly.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/us/politics/21obama.html?_r=1&hp