By Nick DeMarco
Staff Writer

People, both locally and all around America, are breathing a bit easier knowing that they’re not waking up to campaign ads, as well as  phone calls; and who can forget those fine folks that come to your house and ask you who you’re voting for. It was a blast, but we’re all secretly (or not so secretly) glad the elections are over.

Now originally I was going to write just about the negative ads for the presidential race, which obviously was the forefront of this election year, but I also want to take a stab at local elections too. Does anyone feel the way I do? In that I mean I was tired of the mudslinging. I don’t care how many times Hackett didn’t pay his taxes or how Barletta is connected to crime (aren’t most NEPA politicians this way?)

I’m going to let everyone in on a little secret of mine. Local elections annoy me.  I’ll take elections around here seriously when the politicians do. Until then, I’m writing in Happy Meal for the 113th District.

Now as far as the Presidential race goes, we were given a base to work with: Obama is charismatic, but inexperienced; McCain is a patriot, but is too much like George W. Bush. Then things got weird. Obama wants to spend trillions, then that song parody about how McCain doesn’t understand the middle class. Obama is a celebrity, McCain doesn’t know how many houses he has; at some points it was hard to sift through the garbage to get to the real issues.

I don’t see a problem in a candidate being aggressive in their attack. It makes a worthwhile race. However, be smart about what you want to use. I care more about taxes than Obama’s former preacher, or how someone plans to fix our dependency on foreign oil, not how many houses McCain has. Be negative if you want, but be smart about it. We have to be realistic though, it’s probably never going to change, and I think we need to just accept things as the way they are.