You may have seen one at your grandmother’s house when you were little. Anyway, I popped in one tape, which turned out to be of a presidential campaign debate from two or three years before.
I think the candidates were Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. Anyway, the doorbell rang, and I let the repairman in. He glanced at the TV on his way to the basement.
“Are those guys still going at it?” he said. I suppose that was a logical assumption.
To the average person, it probably seems that what politicians like to do most is run their mouths.
It probably wouldn’t surprise most of us if old candidates got together for old times’ sake and yammered away at each other.
That was a long time ago, however, and we are in more desperate circumstances these days, especially in Michigan.
What we need are leaders with new ideas about how to make this state work, about how to live within our means and pay for what we need, and how to attract new jobs to our state.
Everybody knows this. So I was disappointed and annoyed when I read yesterday about a new poll that was commissioned by a couple of Lansing-based public relations firms. The poll, conducted by Dennis Noor Research, supposedly was meant to find out what we’ll be looking for when we elect a new governor next year.
Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. Except that’s not what the poll was really trying to do. It asked questions like this:
“Would you be more or less likely to support a candidate who may have covered up a criminal investigation of Kwame Kilpatrick?”
“Would you be more or less likely to support a candidate who admitted to an extramarital affair while in office?” How about a candidate who shipped U.S. jobs to China? Supported George W. Bush’s agenda? Ran on Jennifer Granholm’s record?
Or finally, my favorite scary question, “Would you be more or less likely to support a career politician?”
Now at first glance, you might think all this is just the usual meaningless silliness of the kind teenagers indulge in, like debating who was worse, Hitler or Stalin.
But that’s not what’s going on here. This poll was conducted so that political consultants could see what forms of negative attack are most likely to stick. So that instead of offering carefully well-thought out solutions to our very real problems, they can try to get their man elected governor by smearing the other candidates.
That kind of campaigning has been horrendously harmful to politics and government. We should demand that any potential candidate pledge never to campaign along the lines suggested by this poll. That might be in their own best interests, too.
For here’s something else the poll found:
Fifty-four percent of Michigan voters said they would be open to voting for an independent candidate for governor. If the major party candidates don’t understand that people are really sick of politics as usual, they may get a very unpleasant surprise.
Comments