What better time to rev up the engine on my long-dormant blog than when the nation's politically minded are so intensely focused on a political contest right here in my own back yard?
I refer of course to the facts that (1) Virginians will go to the polls tomorrow to choose our next governor, and (2) as soon as the polls close, analysts will be going bonkers trying to analyze what the Virginia vote augurs for national Congressional elections next year.
Augury is a great word for this process, referring as it does to ancient and not-very-scientific processes like reading tea leaves, the entrails of a goat, or the patterns of the clouds against the sky at dusk. Whatever the outcome of the Virginia election, I believe its reliability for predicting anything broader than who will be the next occupant of the Governor's mansion in Richmond is minimal.
What's more interesting to me is what this unique election in one single state reflects about how the nastiness of our national discourse affects our political process. The current political climate has caused the two candidates to conduct negative, increasingly bitter campaigns that seem aimed at polarizing the electorate and fomenting division and hatred.
The Democrat, Northam, has run against Trump (even calling him a "maniac" in his primary campaign) and seeks to label his opponent - a long time figure in Virginia politics - as a Trump puppet. Meanwhile the Republican, Gillespie, has tried to paint Northam - a soft-spoken pediatrician - as an enabler of child molesters and pornographers. It's all pretty ridiculous. Worse than ridiculous -- it distorts the voters' picture of the candidates and distracts from discussion of actual issues.
In fact, the two candidates in my view are not so different. Although they belong to different parties, they both are really moderates. These two guys can sit with each other and discuss the state's issues calmly and pragmatically, as they did in early debates between them. Things will get done in Virginia in coming years pretty much as in the past, with an occasional bit of legislation tilting slightly to the right or left. Or so we will hope, if they can maintain their sanity and don't let themselves become creatures of their own campaign distortions.
Please let there be a sanity clause! And let it be invoked immediately. In Washington and across the nation. If we must live under an ugly black cloud of suspicion, hate, and dread, it should at least be a cloud cast by our enemies abroad, not by our fellow Americans.
Posted by: PiedType | November 07, 2017 at 11:12 AM