November 10, 2004
Morning After

It’s over.  That’s the good news.  The bad news?  Approximately half of those running were elected. 

Now that the elections for 2004 are history and we have a hiatus of approximately three weeks before some senatorial bumpkin throws his hat in the ring for the 2008 presidential race, it’s time to ask the question “Why would any self respecting human being run for public office?”  The only possible answer seems to be that self-respect is way down on the totem pole when it comes to the qualities inherent in the makeup of a good politician. 

Participants in the political public arena pretend to be wide-eyed in astonishment over why so many of their fellow citizens are cynical about the political process.  Using the races that culminated with yesterday’s first Tuesday in November vote as a barometer, let us count the ways this year’s crop of candidates earned total disdain. 

Indeed everything a politician needs to know they learned in kindergarten.  Nothing is ever their fault.  It’s always the other guy that “went dirty” first. Right.  If you believe political advertising, why would anyone leave their wife or children alone in a room with a politician?  When it comes to status on life’s ladder, a candidate for public office ranks somewhere between a World Wrestling Federation contestant and a tele-marketer.  And with the WWF at least we know it’s fake.  The candidates for political office say the worst of all possible things about each other and then justify it with a wink, a smile and the old bromide, “Oh it’s just politics.” 

But it’s not politics unless endemic in the political process is electing people who are rude, boring, un-ethical schleps willing to do or say anything, no matter how scurrilous, just to get elected.  And if one is successful at the name calling business for three or four terms your colleagues make sure a building is named in your honor for years of “selfless public service”.   

There’s a hubris about their conduct that is unique to politicians. After election they tend to refer to their fellow politicos as “The honorable gentleman or gentlewoman.”  Honorable?  Politicians? That assumption would be based on what?  Yet we’re not supposed to be cynical. 

In this election, we saw two candidates for the US House of Representatives buy very expensive television ads on Denver TV stations even though the closest their district comes to Denver is over 100 miles south in Pueblo.  And one of their main messages was they should be elected because of their fiscal responsibility.  Were a Grand Junction or Pueblo business owner to buy advertising on a Denver TV station his contemporaries would think he’d lost touch with reality.  But it’s all in a day’s work for a “fiscally responsible” candidate for public office. 

“Oh” we’re told, “don’t let the occasional rotten apple spoil the barrel.  They’re not all that bad.”  I beg to differ.  The Coons/Penry campaign was the lone exception. Issues were discussed, philosophical disagreements were aired but at no time did either candidate “go dirty”.  This one campaign was so unusual it warranted press coverage for its niceness.  Imagine candidates being courteous to one another.  What a concept. 

Obviously this treatise was penned before we discovered whether or not Senator Kerry, after the Red Sox won the World Series and the Patriots a Super Bowl, participated in a Boston trifecta. Only this morning do we know whether Dubya would receive the go ahead on renewing his White House lease for the next four years.  

The two political races in which I had a real interest were the school bond issue and the vote for a new library.  Whether or not they were successful is unknown at this writing.  What is readily apparent is the money requested by both the school and library boards is but a mere pittance when compared to what was spent in Colorado to label one’s opponent as so much pond scum.  But we’re supposed to remember “they’re really honorable people, its just politics.”