Usually, somewhere near the beginning of October, your highly contested campaign hits what has become known as “silly season.” It’s the part of the campaign where everything any candidate does or says becomes subject to attacks from the other side – not just through their surrogates, but directly – and most of these attacks are, frankly, stupid. The longer silly season lasts, the worse things get for the candidates, because voters hate silly season. They really hate it. Nothing turns off everybody – not just undecideds and independents – than seeing two grown candidates turn every tiny decision into evidence the other is unfit to serve.
Here’s the problem with the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial election: it’s silly season all the time in this race.
What issues have the candidates been addressing in this race? I have no idea, other than “jobs” (the generic topic every candidate will talk about until unemployment is at 5% again) and maybe transportation. I do know that Ken hasn’t returned a turkey dinner he got from Star Scientific’s Jonnie Williams. How exactly you return a turkey dinner – both ways conjure images I don’t want to ponder on a full stomach – I have no idea. And I know that Terry’s electric car company was based in Mississippi and didn’t really make many cars. Oh, and Ken doesn’t like abortion and Terry is friends with Bill Clinton. I’ve heard that a few times, too.
The entire Virginia gubernatorial campaign this year has been strictly about both sides trying to disqualify the other. Terry is desperate to convince a majority of Virginians that Ken is a bigoted, anti-woman zealot who will return us to the godforsaken Dark Ages of pre-1973 America. Ken is desperate to convince a majority of Virginians that Terry isn’t from here, he’s a slimy fundraising politico with no real principles who has made a name for himself by being a Friend of Bill and has little experience running anything successful, let alone serving in public office.
What neither seem to be doing a good job of is informing voters about what they plan to do if they get elected. In this regard, Ken has done a better job than Terry, but it’s hard for either of them to break through the heavy, negative disqualify-the-other-guy attack cloud that has settled over the Commonwealth the last few months.
Why are they doing this? Simple – it works. It’s a tried and true tactic, the kind of advice that their general consultants are surely making a lot of money off of. But just because it can result in a winning campaign doesn’t mean it’s good for Virginia or good for the voters. It isn’t. Besides polarizing the electorate even more than they already are (and that’s hard to do, given how divided we’ve become) it causes real damage to the fabric of our democracy.
Cynicism, as I’ve said before, is the biggest threat to America today. It’s cynicism about politics, about government, about the role of government and how we govern that is the clear and present danger we all face. Nobody wants elections where you’re choosing the lesser of two weevils, because people don’t want to vote for someone who is less bad than the other. They want to vote for the best candidate. They want to vote for somebody they trust and somebody who will do a good job. When both sides spend an entire campaign convincing the voters that there is no best candidate, that’s bad. It has a lasting impact on the electorate and it’s not a good lasting impact. It’s the kind of impact that makes people think America is fundamentally broken, when it isn’t, that government is the enemy, which it isn’t, and that all elected officials are corrupt at best and evil at worst, which they aren’t.
Fortunately for all of us, it’s August. The two campaigns still have time to reverse course and wake up from the nightmare this campaign has become. All it’s going to take is for both sides to make a conscious effort to focus on issues, to make their case as to why they have the best ideas and plans for moving Virginia forward, and to trust that voters will be able to figure out who is and isn’t trustworthy and who does or doesn’t have the kind of character we’ve come to expect from our Governors.
So enough about abortion, gifts, GreenTech, Jonnie Williams, anti-sodomy laws, Bill Clinton, birth control, Mississippi, Hawaiian shirts and bad taste in booze and the like. Let’s start talking about what really matters – which of these candidates has the best vision, the best ideas and is best equipped and most likely to successfully manage Virginia and move us forward over the next four years.
(P.S. – The answer to that question is Ken.)
