This evening, I had the pleasure of getting together over drinks and dinner with a few of my fellow conservatives. These were people I’ve never met before, but we got together to discuss conservatism, politics, and activism. We also watched the debate and critiqued the poor performances of both candidates.

Turnout was low. I had expected to see a few more local bloggers, but none showed up. Karl over at Leaning Straight Up had somehow managed to get me an invitation to this, and I was really looking forward to meeting him. Alas, it was not to be.

Leslie Graves from Open Records was putting on the get together. According to the original invitation…

I am able to fund as many as 25 delightful, entertaining, witty, snarky, clued-in and/or infrequent, tentative, novice fiscally conservative bloggers at this little bash and the Sam Adams Alliance has agreed to pay the bar tab.

It’s been a long race for President, spanning nearly two years. Some might say that it’s actually been going on for the last four years. Nevertheless, it’s been going on for a long time, perhaps too long.

When a national political campaign runs this long, it’s expensive. It requires continual fund raising. It requires constant advertising. It costs money to build the organization. It requires huge amounts of money, that must be raised very quickly. It’s comparable, I suppose, to a startup business that has to expand to nationwide markets extremely quickly. People pay out their contributions just like they spend their money to buy a product, but what do they get?

Usually, they don’t get anything. In the Presidential race there have been at least a dozen candidates that fell by the wayside as the campaigns wore on.