It's Finally Over

I don’t know about you, but it took a lot of Maalox to get me through this election cycle. Every two year cycle it seems like it gets uglier and uglier. It very well could be me and my perspective. Being inside politics, I personally know most of the people. It is hard to watch when good people get beat up and it makes it even harder when you know the other guy is lying. Yes, I said it out loud. In this new political environment, I am an old guy. So, maybe I grow weary and less impressed with political rhetoric and yes, with the lies. We, as a society, are a strange bunch. We say how much we hate negative campaigning but we pay big money to watch UFC fights and cage matches and football and we like sports like bull riding and stock car racing and we do not seem to be phased by blood and gore. It seems like this new generation kinda likes “smash mouth politics”. We act civilized but are we really? There is always the dynamic when there is a male/female race. It seems okay for a man to hit a man but I do think it makes, even the toughest of us, a little queasy for a man to hit a woman.

I have learned a lot more in the last few years about politics than I ever really wanted to know. It is interesting when you are actually in it how much more you pick up when watching races. A candidate very seldom goes negative unless they are behind. How do they know they are behind? From polling data. They pay for a consulting firm to poll their district, county or state. They disseminate that information, analyze it and if they find themselves behind, out comes the negative. It was interesting to watch some of the statewide races this year as some of the negative attacks occurred and some candidates chose the high road. As you are reading this, political agencies all over the state and nation will be crunching numbers and looking at results and analyzing the numbers to see what worked and what did not work because in two years, they will have to do it again. As normal people go back to their lives, these political guys will be strategizing on how this new generation of voters reacted to these attacks, as well as how successful the responses, whether positive or negative, affected the outcome of the election. I do want to commend our gubernatorial candidates for a fairly clean contest. But, from there down ballot, it was ugly.

We always say that it is hard to get good people to run for office. While I think that we have cleaned up government quite a bit in the last few years, I also know from having been involved in my own race as well as others, that when people see an election cycle like we have just seen, it makes it really hard to get quality people to put their name on the line and open up their life to the public knowing that there are going to be ugly things said about them all in the name of politics, which seems to be okay, except that it’s really not. All of us, whatever your walk of life, were raised better. We were not taught that it is okay to bad mouth others. In fact, most of us were taught that if you do not have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. It seems that in the political arena, we forget our raising. An issue or an open seat gives us a green light to try to pulverize another human being. I’m sorry, but I just cannot accept that and I don’t think any of us should. I realize it is a pipe dream for me to think that anything is really gonna change or that we are gonna learn to play nice, especially when nice guys finish last a lot of times. It is a tough, ugly, hurtful business. If I do nothing else in my tenure a legislator, I hope that I educate my constituents and friends to look beyond what you read and to think and study the people who ask to be your public servants. Learn as much as you can about candidates and issues before you make your decisions.

I have heard it said that the only time negative campaigning works is when you are behind, ahead, or just even. It is true and I guess, shame on us for letting that be. Now it’s time to put the knives up and get to work. There are a lot of ruffled feathers to be smoothed and a lot of wounds to heal. To use an old cowboy phrase “some of the gashes need to heal up and hair over” because in two years we will do it again. God help us.

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” –Earnest Benn