Diary Of A Mad Voter: Jon Schwedler

Real Candidates Please Step Forward

By Jon Schwedler, Guest Writer, 10-05-07

There is no good way to answer how one ends up watching a C-Span program about an Owings Mills, Maryland political focus group.  But I was alone in my hotel room, don’t have cable at home, it was nappy-time, and the remote was clear on the other side of the room.  A perfect storm. 

So in this near-catatonic state I lay defenseless to the biases of 14 voters from the suburban hinterlands of Baltimore—6 Dems, 6 Reps, and 2 Independents.

The group disagreed about everything but the following:
1) They didn’t want to compete for a seat on an oversold flight with any of the presidential candidates.
2) They thought clean air and water were super ideas.
3) As one middle-aged dental hygienist succinctly put it in her Baltimore brogue—“Ay dohn’t wahnt dem Clintons or Bushes ruhnnin mah layfe anymohr.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, in Baltimoron or any other regional dialect. Clearly the mood in the room was change; nepotism be gone; and no more spin (ie. “lies”).

Yet like many Americans, after taking a closer look at the presidential candidates, I’m wondering what the party big cheeses have been smoking— are they listening to us at all?

In the Republican corner the leading candidates are Hollywood’s ugliest leading man, a Mormon from Massachusetts, and a pro-choice mayor from New York City (“git a rope!”).  Not exactly heartland candidates, and that sound you hear are millions of Western Republicans smacking themselves in the forehead. 

But all is not lost for the Republicans, because of who they are running against.  The two leading Democratic candidates are the most disliked woman in America and a youngish black man whose name rhymes with the world’s most famous terrorist.  In an election that requires the Republican base to stay home for a Democratic victory, the Dems are doing their best to poke the base with a stick by promoting their most in-your-face candidates. 

It makes me wonder if at some point the Sandman is going to step out onto the political stage, sweep these clowns off, and replace them with real candidates.  Oh, how we’ll laugh— they really had us going!  Ha!

Sadly, no.  This is who our celebrated two-party republic has to offer.  No joke. 

This situation is really surprising, because it seems to me in a time not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, there was an election where people who were not from a major urban center played a pivotal role in who became president.  Crazy talk, I know. 

But clearly this is history the political parties are deaf to. It is blatantly obvious to anyone living between the Appalachians and Sierras that the current roster of leading presidential candidates would get blown-away in a general election if opposed by a middle-of-the-road candidate on the other side. 

Luckily for both parties (not so lucky for America) neither party is promoting a middle-of-the-road candidate. 

You can almost forgive the Republican Party’s presidential offering— you get the feeling they decided a while ago they had no chance in 2008, and are running second-stringers. But the Democrats seem to purposely play political limbo — how far can they go before snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? 

I used to think the people who run the political parties are smart.  They do this for a living, so they must know more than I do, right? 

Well … I don’t think so.  And it isn’t just common sense telling me that. 

A recent Pew Research Center poll on the presidential candidates casts a very unflattering light on the leaders, like a blast of sunlight through an open door during happy hour. 

For example, while Hillary Clinton garnered the greatest support among Democrats in this Pew poll, she also received the lowest favorability across all voters (Republicans and Independents really don’t like her).  Both Obama and Edwards had more support across party lines. 

In plain English, it means she has no chance in a general election, yet the press heralds Hillary as the “one to beat” in the primaries. 

The news is identical for the leading candidate on the Republican side, Mitt Romney (who was so crowned by the media after the Iowa straw poll).  Massachusetts Mitt earned the lowest favorability across all voters in the Pew poll— behind Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and even the forgotten man, John McCain.  He even was even edged out by Hillary Clinton!

With incredibly serious issues on the table— Iraq, terrorism, energy production, global warming, water scarcity, immigration, health care, the economy, and a growing chasm between rich and poor — where are the real candidates?  And who is to blame for promoting this pack of leading losers?

First, let’s talk blame.  Obviously a good deal of the blame lies with the parties themselves.  The parties have become “brands” like Coke and Pepsi — packaging for candidates who are able to raise enough money to run, regardless of their background or values.  If you have the cash, the party will find a way to support your point of view filtered through their brand’s special marketing lens.  It doesn’t help that both parties have “careerists” in their ranks that perpetuate these insider games. 

The mainstream media also shoulders some of the blame for vetting the “superstar” candidates.  One of the lessons from the run-up to the Iraq war was the coziness between politicians and the media.  This same relationship still is apparent in the media’s coverage of the “top-tier” candidates. 

Instead of critical analysis and impartial reporting, journalists go to the same cocktail parties and country clubs to gossip with the people they are supposed to be reporting on.  They want to be friends with the “cool” kids— the Clintons, Giulianis, and Obamas of the world.  It is no surprise, then that candidates without addresses in the big media towns are relegated to the “second-tier” and don’t receive the same fawning coverage. As a result, these second-tier candidates’ poll numbers suffer.

But part of the blame also goes to these second-tier presidential candidates themselves, among who are some very promising people with real experience and ideas. They just aren’t throwing enough elbows up at the superstars, and it leads one to suspect they are running for Vice President. 

For example, Bill Richardson is governor of New Mexico, has served as Secretary of Energy, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and was nominated four times for a Nobel Prize.  He’s also half Hispanic, which wouldn’t hurt in Florida (27 electoral votes).  Could you imagine a better candidate on paper?

Yet when the opportunity presented itself earlier this year as Hillary and Obama publicly fought over the trivial fundraising loyalties of a Hollywood producer, Richardson sat on his tongue instead of chastising these two catty superstars for not fighting about real issues.

But what about you and I— we get away scott-free, right?  We’re just poor lowly citizens, too busy with our lives to look into the candidates who will run our lives.  Wrong. 

Actually (and you’ve heard this before, blah-blah, but it’s true), we’re the ones mostly to blame, because we allow our politicians to lie to us time and again, without any sort of accountability.  We go through the election process in a near-catatonic state, too lazy to get up, grab the remote, and change the candidate. 

It’s time to change that. 

Jon Schwedler is a husband, father, hunter, angler, wildlife conservationist, reformed rugby player, and Independent (capital “I”) voter.  He lives in New Mexico.  His only experience with politics is making phone calls from Butte, Montana for gubernatorial candidate Brian Schweitzer, and sharing an emergency room with Dick Cheney.

Editor’s note: Jon Schwedler’s guest blog is part of a new feature on NewWest.Net/Politics called “Diary of a Mad Voter,” a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. Check back this week at www.newwest.net/madvoter.

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