And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that finally, those Iowa caucus campaigns are over!
I can get back my telephone.
I can get back my mailbox.
I can get back my daily newspapers.
I can get back my radio news and talk shows.
I can get back to my normal television viewing.
The loss of my land line telephone was most irksome. I perhaps owe an apology to one or more individuals or contacts for having ignored their calls by not answering the phone. I do not have caller ID and the phone is in a room where I spend very little time, so I am not often in the same room when it rings. And after two poll or campaign calls in five minutes, I did sometimes let the next three in the following 15 minutes go without budging from my comfortable seat in the other room or at the kitchen table or stove.
We learned in radio broadcasting that “dead” air is radio’s worst enemy. If someone is searching for your station and no sound is being broadcast at that moment, the prospective listener may not return. By the same token, if suddenly a listener hears nothing, he or she may move to another station.
That’s how I treated those obvious poll or campaign robotic calls. If someone didn’t speak up within three or four seconds, I hung up.
The last few weeks my mailbox has been full of those slick paper two-sided flyers touting some candidate’s alleged good points.
Daily papers seemed to feel an obligation to devote several column inches to each candidate’s latest Iowa appearance or press release statements. With all those Republican candidates and three Democrat candidates, that took several pages each issue. Was anything else going on in the state? Who cares!
Someone once opined that the way America selects its leaders in a republican form of government is awful, but it still beats that of any other nation.
Comedians found some good material.
When Trump refused to face Megyn Kelly of the Fox News debate team, some wondered why Trump said he was not afraid to go face-to-face with Russian strongman Putin but was afraid of the bright and pretty blonde newswoman.
And when Bernie Sanders released his medical records showing a large number of non-life-threatening conditions, past and present, a pundit wondered if there was any connection between that and Bernie’s insistence on free medical care for life for all Americans. But as a senator, he already has that, hasn’t he?
Besides, anyone who has reached his age and beyond is pretty much familiar with all those things Bernie cited.
The infirmities of aging.