From the first, heavily populated primaries – wasn’t the first debate sometime in September of last year? – right through to the home stretch of the last couple of weeks, this has been a veritable feast of issues, debates, polls and non-stop cable TV coverage (I’m going to hate to have to go back to watching wall-to-wall coverage of the latest missing and presumed murdered housewife).
It has been nothing short of a terrific campaign, at the national level that is, but we’ll get back to that in a minute.
First, a few words need to be said about what a lousy campaign this has been at the local level.
Rhode Island voters should feel cheap and used. You have been rudely taken for granted and you don’t seem to care enough even to be insulted, much less do anything about it.
Sen. Jack Reed knows he has your vote in his hip pocket, so does Rep. Patrick Kennedy, so neither of them is going to make even a pretense of worrying that you might vote for someone else. You are someone they can call at 10 o’clock on Saturday night and know they can still get a date. That’s the Rhode Island voter for incumbent Democrats: cheap and easy.
Not once would either of these guys carve out an hour to face their opponents and give voters an opportunity to see them defend their records and put forward an agenda for the next term. Not on TV, not on radio, not on the stage in the local high school auditorium. Hey, why should they? You aren’t going to require it. Just like the guy who calls at 10 on Saturday night knows he doesn’t have to blow a lot of money on dinner or sit through a movie. You’re going to give him what he wants no matter what. And make no mistake about it; the result is going to be the same for you when these guys go back to Washington.
Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill liked to tell a story about the first time he ran for office and ran into a former favorite high school teacher who lived across the street. She said she was voting for him, but only reluctantly. Why reluctantly, he asked. Because he hadn’t come knocking on her door looking for her vote, she answered. "Tom, let me tell you something," O’Neill would recall her saying, "people like to be asked."
Well, Rhode Islanders aren’t that fussy, I guess.
Patrick Kennedy couldn’t find an hour in his busy schedule these last two months to face off with Republican Jon Scott and Independent Ken Capalbo in some forum or another? Do you really buy that? Jack Reed couldn’t sit across a table from Republican Bob Tingle and discuss a few topics of interest to voters – I don’t know, a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, for instance, or a war in Iraq that has dragged on longer than World War II?
Reed and Kennedy know they have a sure thing, why should they bother with anything like that? Democrat Jim Langevin, to his credit, at least showed up for a back-and-forth with Republican Mark Zaccaria on the Dan Yorke Show last week.
When I asked Kennedy about this in an interview, he broke into incomplete sentences and said: "At this stage, people know my record through and through and the way these campaigns are at the very end, the last thing…are these gotcha kind of things and I’m not going to subject myself to that."
Really? Is subjecting himself to that really so intolerable in exchange for a cushy job in the corridors of power with a six-figure salary and fully paid health care most Americans can only dream about? It’s too much to ask for him to stand before voters and take a few pointed questions from a political opponent who doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of beating him anyway.
It’s just so much easier for Reed and Kennedy take millions of dollars from contributors and put up a few TV ads, maybe swing through an old folk’s home or two at lunchtime and call it a campaign.
The only way to get more responsive government is to demand it, and the only effective place to do that is at the voting booth.
Perhaps congressional incumbents need to be sent a message this year.
But how to do that? A vote for the Republican opponent can be rationalized away, lost in the numbers. But perennial candidate Chris Young is running a write-in campaign for Senate this year. An unexpectedly high number of votes for him (don’t worry, he won’t win) would surely register as constituent dissatisfaction, not a popular groundswell. In the congressional race, you could pull a Linc Chafee and vote for Edward M. Kennedy in the 1st District. Have a little self-respect. Don’t let your vote be taken for granted by politicians. Make them earn it. O.K., tirade over, back to the presidential race.
Both the Republicans and Democrats fielded an impressive array of candidates at the start of the process; each party had several hopefuls who could have been credible leaders of the free world.
John McCain seemed to survive the GOP primaries on sheer guts, determination and desire. In the end, he wanted it more than any of the others. Perhaps he wanted it too much. Because this good and decent and courageous man ultimately surrendered his integrity and just about everything else to gain the GOP nomination. The religious far right of the Republican party was the guy calling at 10 Saturday night and John McCain was sitting by the phone, praying it would ring.
It is not a good thing when a politician wants an office like the presidency that badly and voters can often sense it, like they did with Al Gore in 2000.
McCain has run an even worse general election campaign. Was he really serious, trying to make Bill Ayers an issue when the entire country was worrying about nothing except their 401(k)s? Did he think a Republican could make an issue of "distributing the wealth" when a Republican president has spent the last eight years distributing the wealth from the middle class to the uber-rich?
The Democratic primary race eventually winnowed down to an extended Hillary vs. Obama smackdown and Obama prevailed.
When Obama first announced back in February, some idiot wrote in this column that the freshman senator’s problem wasn’t that he is black, but that he is green. Well, shut my mouth.
This "green" newcomer beat the Clintons. And he did it not with policy specifics, not with the vision thing, but with pure, raw politics. By understanding and mastering the intricacies of state caucuses, by out-organizing and out-fundraising and doing the other nuts-and-bolts things better than the Clintons, who until that point had been the universally recognized masters of the political arts.
Political science professors will be using this election as a lesson for many semesters to come.
Obama proved himself to be a political maestro, going around the country talking about "change" and "hope" and letting everyone fill in the blanks, believing he would bring the type of change they wanted and that he hoped for the same things they do. Brilliant!
Yes, this election campaign is one for the history books and I’m sorry it’s over.
But it’s O.K., I guess. After all, the 2010 race for governor begins on Wednesday.
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