Tomorrow, two months before the third of November, the general election for president will already have begun. North Carolina will begin absentee voting, with all the other states to follow in the coming days and weeks. How it will all play out is anyone's guess, at this point.

When I say that, I'm not talking so much about the result of the election as the mechanics of voting this year. In normal times, both parties would now be urging their base to vote early, whether in person (at an early-voting polling site) or by absentee/mail-in ballot. This is called "banking votes," because once those votes are turned in it doesn't matter what else happens in the campaign, the vote is "safe in the bank" for one candidate or the other. This helps dampen the effect of any last-minute surprises (October or otherwise) on the actual vote count.

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This year's presidential campaign, like just about every other aspect of American life during the coronavirus pandemic, is going to be different than any we've seen before. How different is still an open question, because nobody really knows where the country will be in a month or two. Perhaps the pandemic will significantly abate. Conversely, it could get far worse with the advent of the yearly flu season. Either one would affect how the two candidates campaign. But there is one thing that appears pretty obvious at this point -- the first presidential debate is going to be absolutely critical.

Today, the moderators for all four debates (three presidential, one vice-presidential) were announced. Surprisingly, after what we saw during the Democratic primary debates, there will only be one lone moderator for each debate. This is a good thing, in my opinion, because at times the "tag-team moderation" format can get pretty chaotic. One strong moderator will avoid this altogether. But the best news to me is that the first debate will be moderated by Fox News host Chris Wallace.

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President Donald Trump began his political career with a baseless conspiracy theory: Barack Obama was not born in the United States, therefore he was not eligible to be president. This theory is false in two significant ways: (1) even if, just for the sake of argument, Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, he still would have been eligible to be president (see: Ted Cruz, George Romney, John McCain); and (2) Barack Obama was indeed born in Hawai'i, just after it became a state. But all of that didn't matter to Trump, who became the most prominent "birther" around, long before he began his run for the presidency. But just because he now is president, his penchant for looney-tunes conspiracy theories has not abated one bit. In the past two days, he's floated out another whopper, about a planeload of thugs which flew either into or out of Washington to disrupt the Republican National Convention.

As usual, Trump has zero evidence to support his looney-tunes story. He either read something like it on the internet or talked to someone else who read it on the internet. That's it. That's the whole story, plain and simple. But that hasn't stopped Trump from talking about it twice now in the past two days.

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Today, I am going to let Joe Biden speak for himself. In past election cycles, I have printed transcripts of speeches from Democratic candidates, but I don't believe I've ever done so during the general election.

I felt it was worth it today, because I just read the speech Joe Biden just gave in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is the kickoff to the traditional general election season, and Biden makes his case in such strong and forceful language that, rather than just running excerpts and commenting on them, I felt the entire speech deserved to be presented. It really is that good.

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Is it over yet?

No, really, this has to be it... it's gotta be over now... right?

Not unlike experiencing the end of The Lord Of The Rings for the first time, last night I watched President Donald Trump give the longest convention acceptance speech in modern history (with the only possible other contender being Trump's 2016 speech) while continually wondering (from about ten past the hour onwards) when he would begin to wrap it up. Several times I was convinced he had done so... but then he just kept on talking. I mean, Frodo's safely back in the Shire, so it's got to be the end, right?

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Last night, while watching the continuing study in contradiction that is the Republican National Convention, I had to wonder at several points who, exactly, is president right now? After all, the campaign for Donald Trump seems to be operating from the point of view that if only Trump were president then he could solve America's massive current problems. On subject after subject, we were told that things out there are really, really scary and that the only response to this dystopian world was to elect a savior who would deliver us from all the frightfulness.

This would be a fine message for a challenger to get elected as an outsider, as Trump indeed did in 2016. But it also ignores completely that the world we find ourselves in right now is one where Donald Trump has been president for three and a half years. It's the mother of all disconnects, really.

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When reading other reviews of the Republican National Convention today, many seemed to me to be making the mistake of proclaiming: "Trump is preaching to the choir, he's only interested in firing up his base." There is indeed a lot of this sort of thing, but there is also a sustained effort at pandering to distinct voter demographics where Trump is either performing weakly or worse. The two efforts -- fire up the base and reach out to possible "persuadable" voters -- set up another disjointed disconnect of epic proportions, to be sure, but as Trump says, it is what it is.

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Republicans promised they'd put on an uplifting convention. To say they failed to reach this goal on their first night is a vast understatement. What we got instead was fear, on steroids.

Granted, their job was a tough one from the get-go. During the Democratic convention, there was a mix of (as Joe Biden framed it) the light and the dark. But the Democrats' message was pretty clear: we're in a dark period right now, and we can move towards the light with the repudiation of Donald Trump and all his enablers. The Republican message was the opposite, which is a pretty hard case to make, considering the current state of affairs. According to the Republicans, everything is just peachy right now, but if Biden wins, things will become apocalyptically bad overnight. There's just one problem with this formulation, however, and that is that we are hardly experiencing Utopia right now, as the COVID-19 deaths climb towards 180,000, unemployment is still in double digits -- higher than at any point during the Great Recession -- and the economy looks like it is now stalling due to the Republicans refusing to pass another pandemic stimulus bill. In other words, the American public is fully capable of looking around at their own lives and seeing that Utopia is far from what they're experiencing right now.

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Today's one of those days when I had a subject already in mind for a column, but then read a few other columns that essentially already said what I was going to say (and in at least one case, said it much better than I could have). Fortunately, a second subject also popped up while reading the news today. So what I'm going to do is provide a few longish excerpts from the articles I read on the first subject at the end of this column, as a sort of "imagine the column Chris would have written" mental exercise (I even had a theme song in mind...), complete with the links to the original articles.

Instead, I'm going to write about weed. Weed voters, in particular. Now, any longtime reader of this column knows that I've been banging this particular drum for a very long time -- in particular, the fact that marijuana legalization is a political issue ripe for support from one of the major political parties. Sadly, both parties continue to shy away from it, although the Democrats have done a lot more "evolving" on the issue than most Republicans. Some Democrats, I should say, because not everyone's on board yet. I didn't notice this at the time, but here's a rundown of what happened to the party's official platform document this time around:

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From the wisecracking Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Joe Biden's resounding speech, the last night of the Democratic National Convention was a solid hit, with only one sour spot (but we'll get to Mike Bloomberg in a moment...). National nominating conventions are traditionally supposed to build in pitch and intensity all week long to the "big finish" on the final day. Democrats certainly succeeded in this regard last night, topped off by perhaps the best speech Joe Biden has ever given. All around, the fourth and final day of the Democratic National Convention was a solid winner.

On the previous three nights, the convention was hosted by three actresses who (for the most part) just read their lines and provided the segues from one speaker to the next. Julia Louis-Dreyfus did not follow this model, to put it mildly. She personally interacted with several speakers during their introduction, and dropped zinger after zinger to provide moments of comedy (something that has been mostly lacking in the virtual convention up until now). She ripped Mike Pence for not being able to pronounce Kamala Harris's name, Trump for cheating on golf, Trump for requiring tear gas and federal troops to go to church, and in her funniest line (to me, at any rate), told people the number to text to was pretty easy to remember: "Person, woman, man, camera, TV, 30330. It's easy! Anyone can do it!"

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