Which is the problem. It bothers me she announced so early. She won’t be working fulltime for her constituency for the next couple of years. Not that she won’t do impressive things in the Senate now, and that California won’t benefit, but they’ll also be performances before a national audience.

It’s part of the broader problem of America’s insane multi-year election campaigns. Where most of the rest of the world gets it over with in a month or two, we wallow in loud and bitter partisanship for two years, and conduct a death march to weed out the moderate and the civil. The permanent campaign is a big contributor to today’s hyperpartisanship.

It costs money to maintain fulltime national political campaigns to stoke the partisan anger, and finally we come to the unlimited cash flow from the dark side enabled by Citizens United. You can’t stop the permanent campaign by tactics like prohibiting political advertising except in a designated campaign period, because those cut against the principle of free expression. But we can starve the organized and professionally-managed beast of today’s toxic political industry.

Undoing the damage the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision did is part of the Democrats’ agenda. If they succeed, there’ll be a lot less incentive to campaign for two years before an election, and maybe we can get a breather for at least a year between election campaigns. WOuldn’t that be a refreshing change?