ShareThisBy PETER SCHRAG
Thursday, November 09, 2006
It'll take longer this year to mop up the floor, fumigate the premises and mouth-wash the bad taste away. The slime is deeper, the stench more pungent, and while it's ever-fashionable to complain about "negative" campaigning, there's negative on issues and then there's just plain slime.
The president, his "boy genius" Karl Rove, master of the politics of division, and the leaders and consultants of the GOP must have been certain their base is still infested with homophobes, xenophobes and racists. Otherwise, why devote so much energy waving bloody shirts? Democrats as purveyors of the "homosexual agenda," soft on immigration, or, in the case of Senate candidate Harold Ford in Tennessee, who is black, as lusting for interracial sex.
Meanwhile, there were the chicken hawks attacking honored veterans, going back to the campaign of 2002 to the successful slander of Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a genuine war hero, who lost both legs and one arm in Vietnam. The winner in the race, Saxby Chambliss, was in law school and never served.
That started the current fashion, now modeled by Dick Cheney, who, despite his draft dodging during Vietnam, was never embarrassed attacking Democrats as appeasers and border-line traitors, and the Swift boating of John Kerry. More recently there's been the sanctimonious John Doolittle, who though he never saw the inside of a uniform either, much less real warfare, had no hesitation accusing his opponent, a Vietnam veteran, of being soft on terror.
Ditto for Sen. George Allen's attacks on the highly praised war novels written by his Democratic opponent in Virginia, Jim Webb, who was winning the Navy Cross, the Silver Star and a couple of Bronze Stars in Vietnam while Allen was playing good ol' boy in the locker rooms of the University of Virginia.
It may be months before we know how much dirty pool there was at the polls. How many voters were driven off by new requirements for photo IDs they didn't have because they don't drive, or by threats against immigrants who vote that they could be sent to jail or by phony poll watchers? Last week, bounty hunters hired by the GOP in Orange County were charged with fraud in filing false voter registration affidavits. How many weren't caught? How many voting machines didn't work; how many results will be challenged in recounts and lawsuits? How many complaints will there be that hordes of illegals were taken to the polls by political operatives?
None of this stuff is new, and it's been done by both parties. Stuffing ballot boxes is almost as old as democracy. Dick Daley may have stolen the election for John Kennedy in 1960. In 1996, Orange County's pugnacious Rep. Bob Dornan complained, though never proved, that illegal voting by aliens made the difference in his narrow loss to Democrat Loretta Sanchez.
Ultimately, electronic machines may well count votes more accurately than earlier technologies. But in this era of intensified partisanship, and after the dirty tricks, dirty money and burglaries by Richard Nixon's White House plumbers in 1972, and the purges of black voters and other ballot box manipulation in Florida in 2000, you're going to have a hard time getting people to feel confident in any close outcome.
To say that's dangerous for democracy is obvious. But what's even more dangerous is the belief that all politics is inevitably dirty and thus to be avoided. That's what the dirty ones hope for, and often the media, fearful they'll be accused of bias, reinforce that. There are some Democrats caught in their own muck this year, but the lion's share of the dirt and the most blatant corruption in high office _ from Abramoff through Cunningham, DeLay, Enron, Foley, Halliburton, Ney, Rudy, Savafian, Scanlon, Volz and Wilkes _ belongs to the GOP.
In California, the system itself reinforces political alienation. Our ballots are too long, too confusing and require too many choices. We want to vote on everything but can't possibly be sufficiently informed on the 30 or 40 contests, from governor to park board member, from measures on campaign finance reform to flood control and water resource policy, which we're supposed to decide. In the six statewide elections in the past four years, we've been confronted with 50-plus state propositions.
The November ballot pamphlet ran to 190 pages, much of it legalese set in small type. Given the large stakes and the planned confusion, that invites the falsehoods and manipulation that $700 million in campaign money, most of it from corporations and a few individual deep pockets, makes possible. From little truths big lies are made.
We've had similar periods before, the Gilded Age of the post-Civil War years, among others. Eventually things corrected themselves, as they probably will again. But in the meantime, the political pitchmen are confident there's a sucker born every minute and that they can sell him almost any goody if they promise no new taxes. Quick, get the air freshener.
