20 Campaign Reporters Wasted A Year Trying To Make A Useless Prediction About Hillary Clinton

Sometimes it's almost possible to feel sorry for campaign reporters during a presidential election cycle. Take, for example, this report in Politico about the staggering waste of a score of people's short time on this earth:

In the past year, at least 20 journalists from as many news organizations have tried to put a date, rough or specific, on when the former secretary of state would announce her highly anticipated presidential bid. That guessing game came to an end last week when the Clinton team signed a lease on campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, all but guaranteeing an announcement within the next two weeks, in compliance with federal law.

The shifting timeline, which ranged at times from January to October, was almost certainly the result of changing plans within the nascent Clinton campaign, as well as the conflicting interests of various Clinton confidants and sources. Nevertheless, the changes likely left readers doing a double take.

Twenty news organizations essentially spent a year attempting to guess when Hillary Clinton would announce her intentions to run for president, an exercise that is pointless for two reasons:

1. Clinton has obviously been a candidate during that entire time.
2. It's actually not a public service to guess an announcement date. If any "readers" were doing a "double take," it was probably because they kept wondering, "Why does this reporter seem to think I give a fig about any of this?" It's like 20 reporters were competing to become the next "Ed Glosser: Trivial Psychic."

No one who managed to guess the answer to the question of "What time is Hillary Clinton?" will be remembered for this feat of journalistic derring-do. In fact, the only thing you get for having spent a year on obtaining this unnecessary information is the knowledge, in the hour of your death, that you wasted a substantial portion of your life and will now die alone and unremarked upon.

Meanwhile, Clinton will probably announce in a couple of weeks or whatever, unless she doesn't. It doesn't matter. When it happens, you'll know it.

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