Our state is in a profound, long-term economic crisis, and we are going to pick a new governor and replace most of the legislature.
We are also going to pick a new secretary of state, attorney general, and elect at least three new congressmen, maybe more.
That’s a lot more change than we’re used to. And possibly as a result, this has been one of the dirtiest campaigns I’ve ever seen. That’s hard to quantify, but something I am certain is so. And I’m not alone. Last weekend, I heard from a true veteran of the political wars: Joe Schwarz, a physician from Battle Creek, who has been mayor of that city, run for congress three times, governor once, and was elected to four terms in the state senate. He considered making an independent bid for governor this year, but decided against it.
He was clearing brush at his ranch in Montana and stopped to send me an e-mail. “This is the ugliest political extravaganza that I’ve witnessed in my now more than 70 years,“ he said.
“Don’t know how you feel about it, but for myself, the obscene amounts of money, the out-of-state consultants who slink in and then skulk out by dark of night, and the outrageous negative ads have pretty much spoiled it for me,” he said.
Schwarz knows something about ugly; after serving a single term in Congress, he was defeated in a Republican primary four years ago by a flood of misleading negative ads.
Negative campaigning is nothing new, of course. Richard Nixon won election to the U.S. Senate in 1950 by smearing his opponent as a woman, “pink right down to her underwear.”
That was the same year a candidate for the Senate in Florida allegedly charged, in a speech to uneducated rural voters, that his opponent’s sister was a “thespian who had matriculated at a university.”
Yet the brazenness of the lies this year was truly astounding. Homes have been flooded with robo-calls spreading untruths about many of the gubernatorial candidates. The most outrageous moment in the entire campaign, however, may have come in a state senate race where one of the candidates accused another of sponsoring a bill to legalize gay sex in public places.
When asked about this charge, which was absolutely untrue, the offender reportedly said, “we’re just trying to get out the message,” and “that’s the way we do things in Macomb County.”
Nobody running for governor has stooped that low. But there have been plenty of blatant falsehoods. Fortunately, there is a new team of truthbusters at work, the Michigan Truth Squad.
Started and funded by the nonpartisan Center for Michigan it pays some of the best reporters in the state, like John Bebow, Susan Demas and Rick Haglund, to painstakingly sort through and analyze campaign ads and blow the whistle on the worst of the worst.
You can check out their work on a very classy website at michigantruthsquad.com, and I’ll tell you this. >From now on, I wouldn’t even think of casting a vote without it.
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