Well, well. With two weeks left before the midterm elections (as of this writing), the race for Congress has turned out to be quite a show. Although it isn’t making the headlines anymore, the Republican Party is still trying to contain fallout from the Mark Foley sex scandal (if cyber can even be considered sex) and is giving Speaker of the House* Dennis Hastert the consideration of a gangrened limb: cut it off before it spreads! At the same time, they’re fingering the Democrats and the liberal media for holding back the information for maximum political damage, and doing what they do best: blaming the gays. The Foley issue, the final straw (after Harriet Miers) in a party that’s been in a slow-but-steady tailspin since Congress’ crass intervention in the Terri Shiavo case in early 2005, is a greasy, sleazy stain on the legislature’s wedding dress that’s threatening to catch fire and torch its marriage with the executive branch.

Now let’s pretend for the sake of argument that this is a liberal conspiracy, that the news outlets sat on and broke the Foley story out of partisanship to take back Congress; and just for the hell of it, let’s go one step further and say the teenage pages who traded the most lurid of emails and instant messages with Foley were jerking him around (instead of the reverse, and off) and did it as a vindictive joke, and that this isn’t a big deal as anybody’s making it out to be.

I still wouldn’t give a rat’s arse or an elephant’s head.

Lyndon Johnson may have pioneered negative advertising with his infamous “Daisy” ad (which insinuated that a Barry Goldwater victory would mean nuclear Armageddon, a claim the Bush administration has gleefully resurrected and turned on its creators), but the latter-day Republican party perfected the art of political sabotage. One of the many revelations of the Watergate investigation was the Nixon administration’s involvement with one Donald Segretti, a gremlin who specialized in what he charmingly referred to as ratfucking, that is, sabotaging a rival campaign by any means possible: infiltrating their ranks, inviting constituents to bogus events, slander. One of his protégés was a bunch-backed toad named Karl Rove who went on to help Texas governor George W. Bush win the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 by quite possibly having a hand in the spread of a rumor that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child (referring to a Bangladeshi girl he adopted). They did it to one of their own, so what chance would an outsider have?

My own state, the Republican bastion of Idaho, is hardly immune from this chicanery. The offices of House of Representatives Democratic candidate Larry Grant have been receiving complaints from citizens who have been getting incessant automated phone calls, sometimes as many as four an hour, that urge them to vote for Grant. At the end of the message is a disclosure that the annoying calls are funded by… the Republican National Campaign Committee! After right winger Bill Sali burned his bridges in the primaries, the only thing he can do now is turn up the heat on someone who actually has a chance of winning.

So in the highly unlikely event that the timing of the Foley flare up was engineered by the Democrats (which it wasn’t; go to http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=112097 for a nice summary on who in the media knew what and why it wasn’t investigated earlier), understand that if the Republicans had the goods, they would do the exact same thing. They’ll go after a sex scandal like sharks to blood; just look at how a stain on a dress led to an impeachment proceeding against Bill Clinton. Talk about overblown!

Amidst all of this partisan rancor it’s easy to become jaded and cynical about the political process, but still, it’s important that you vote and blah, blah, blah…. You’ve heard this whole spiel before. Democracy certainly doesn’t always work out happily. The 2000 presidential election proved that the majority does not always rule, and 2004 proved that when it does, it does not always do so wisely; just ask the roughly 60 percent of pollsters who are unhappy with Bush.

So why should you bother mailing in your ballot (since you’re either an absentee voter from another state or getting an Oregon mail-in)? Well for one thing, it’s not a presidential election, so there’s no need to worry about the electoral college throwing out the losing votes. Indeed, there’s plenty of local and state business to sink one’s teeth into; in Idaho there’s a ballot proposition (2) analogous to Oregon’s Measure 37 from a couple years ago (which has opened a Pandora’s box of urban sprawl and unwanted development), and right here in Coos Bay there is a referendum on allowing liquid natural gas to be piped in through the city.

Both of these initiatives I’ve mentioned have come up against strong local opposition, which some deride as being a vocal minority. And to that I say, so what? In a country where only 50 percent of the electorate actually votes, anyone who does, regardless of who they choose, is part of a vocal minority. If a group of concerned citizens can make an impact, especially in local politics where they are being affected, then all the more power to them. There is a difference between grassroots action and astroturf, however, and it is important the distinction be made: a grassroots effort starts with a ragtag group of local citizens banding together and building up support for some policy; astroturf starts from the top, from outside (usually commercial) interests, and then works its way down, gaining some local support but always being propped up by out-of-towners with deep pockets. So it is with Proposition 2 in Idaho, funded by New York millionaire Howard Rich, and the LNG line, a vast commercial enterprise that will create some great jobs and profits, if it doesn’t explode and kill us all. One side rallies the citizenry to testify against the proposal, the other pays lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to rationalize a position. The majority of people, however, either cares too little or are too busy to get involved. And it’s certainly a lot easier to bitch about something you had nothing to do with than it is to take responsibility for a choice that may not pan out as you think it will.

So there’s our republican democracy today: no longer an Athenian ideal of citizen participation, but rather like some spurious hobby or sporting event, where the handful who are interested can spar. Imagine if voting was mandatory, or on a related note, if not just a majority of the voters but of the electorate had to choose something for a decision to be made. It’s not realistic and maybe not even desirable, but wouldn’t it be nice to see more people taking their share of this commodity that we’re so eager to export to the rest of the world? Just a thought. But really, the voter participation statistics are likely to take another hit; the religious right will probably sit this one out because of the Foley scandal.

Then again I could just be getting my hopes up. The Democrats are great at screwing the pooch (see their selection of John Kerry as their presidential candidate), and no matter who rules in Congress, there’s still a Republican president with a veto at his disposal. And party dominion waxes and wanes as surely as the moon; the Democrats became bloated, corrupted, and complacent and were replaced in 1994, and now the Republicans are likely to suffer the same fate, as will the Dems again at some future point. But hey, we do what we can. I’ll close this with an appropriate entry from satirist Ambrose Bierce’s classic Devil’s Dictionary:

Conservative, (n)
A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Happy ballot-days!

*In the article that ran I wrote that Hastert was House Majority Leader, an obvious error that I should
have caught and have corrected for this page.