Postal Politics

Guess how many political brochures, fliers and postcards Anita and I have received in the mail this campaign season?

Ten? Twenty? Thirty-five?

The answer is 88. And that’s not counting today’s or tomorrow’s mail.

I spent hours last Saturday going through the pile that had accumulated on my desk. I went through stuff from the state Democratic Party – we received fliers on Supreme Court candidates and the ballot proposals about which I wrote last October 18 – as well as brochures on local races. There were mailings touting C.J. Davis for township supervisor, Roy Sweet for treasurer and Curtis Hertel Jr. for register of deeds. There was a brochure from Jim Jamo – an attorney who wants to be a Circuit Court Judge – along with oversized postcards from Evan and Kara Hope, the married politicians whom we support for township clerk and county commissioner, that were positive and therefore in the minority.

The state Republican Party sent eleven – yes, eleven – negative pieces attacking local Democratic state representative candidate Tom Cochran. (Cochran, a former Lansing fire chief whom the state GOP apparently believes would be the most corrupt, incompetent politician ever to pollute the halls of the State Capitol Building, recently donated $50 of his own money to help fund a field trip at my nine-year-old’s school. He’s got our votes.)

The county Republicans sent mailings encouraging us to support Vince Dragonetti for county commissioner. Apparently they thought photos of him with GOP Congressman Mike Rogers, GOP Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley and GOP Secretary of State Ruth Johnson would sway rather than dissuade me. They were wrong. (Johnson was in the news earlier this year for claiming that thousands of ineligible folks vote in elections which is why we were being required to check a box on ballot applications confirming that we’re eligible. Too bad for her that a state analysis found just 54 voters out of 58,000 sampled were actually ineligible and GOP Governor Rick Snyder vetoed a bill that would have mandated her unconstitutional checkbox.)

We heard from the Delhi Democratic Club, the Michigan Nonprofit Association, the Foundation for Future Prosperity, Protect Working Families, the Blue Green Alliance, the Sierra Club, Service Employees International Union, Americans for Prosperity, the America Votes Action Fund, Planned Parenthood, Citizens Protecting Michigan’s Constitution, and Protecting Michigan Taxpayers. Seems like the only organizations that didn’t try to tell us what to do and how to do it were AA, PBS, OPEC and the CIA. As far as we know.

Unscrupulous billionaire Matty Moroun’s “The People Should Decide Ballot Committee” sent a whopping 14 brochures urging us to aid him in his audacious effort to preserve his monopoly. (Moroun owns the 83-year-old Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit to Windsor; see my previous posts on this greedy one-percenter.) His truth-stretching literature claims that Canada would control the construction jobs associated with a new bridge and Governor Snyder would insist on using – get this – foreign steel.

I guess true patriots hate foreign alloys too.

We were warned of evil extremists hijacking the constitution and greedy liberals threatening conservative values. (Anita and I agreed that if we see, hear or read about one more pandering politician paying lip service to “conservative values,” we’re gonna go nuts. Conservatives have raped women, molested kids, consorted with hookers, belittled brown folks, abandoned the needy, placed religion before science and put the rich before the poor. Are these the values they swear to preserve?) Candidates were accused of cutting police, closing senior centers, throwing children to the wolves, spending public money like drunken sailors and lining their pockets at the expense of the electorate. One morally-challenged fellow wants to give food stamps to lottery winners. Another was slightly delinquent on his own taxes which means, according to the literature, that there’s no way in hell he should be trusted with ours. Still another opposes laughing babies, butterflies, birthdays and rainbows.

If Anita’s and my experience is any indication, there’s just too much dirt flying around for any of these mailings to have the impact on voters that the senders seek.

I don’t remember receiving this much political mail before and I don’t remember it being so damn negative and nasty. Maybe it’s because of Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that paved the way for super PACS and special interests to spend vast sums of money on specific candidates and campaigns. Maybe it’s because it’s harder than ever to capture voter attention and get people to the polls. Maybe it’s always been this way and I just don’t remember.

For whatever reason, I used to think there was nobility in public service - but judging by the contents of my mailbox these days, politics is a lot of crass and little class. I look forward to Wednesday.

Age and Beauty

Pink Floyd - Mother

Sunday poetry

My Mother Goes to Vote

We walked five blocks
to the elementary school,
my mother’s high heels
crunching through playground gravel.
We entered through a side door.

Down the long corridor,
decorated with Halloween masks,
health department safety posters—
we followed the arrows
to the third grade classroom.

My mother stepped alone
into the booth, pulling the curtain behind her.
I could see only the backs of her
calves in crinkled nylons.

A partial vanishing, then reappearing
pocketbook crooked on her elbow,
our mayor’s button pinned to her lapel.
Even then I could see—to choose
is to follow what has already
been decided.

We marched back out
finding a new way back down streets
named for flowers
and accomplished men.
I said their names out loud, as we found

our way home, to the cramped house,
the devoted porch light left on,
the customary meatloaf.
I remember, in the classroom converted
into a voting place—
there were two mothers, conversing,
squeezed into the children’s desk chairs.

~Judith Harris

Who's There?

Alicia Keys - Fallin'

Give Lance a Chance

“Accessibility and accountability are the two most important things a Congressman can be, and my opponent is neither. You will never have to make a campaign contribution to get time with me. I have an obligation to the people, not the other way around.”

~ Lance Enderle

Sometimes I think it doesn’t really matter who represents me in Congress since the whole institution stinks. Sure, the right-wing fanatic who’s represented the more than 662,500 residents of  Michigan's eighth congressional district since 2001, Mike Rogers (R-Howell), makes me nauseous and the guy running against him this year, Lance Enderle (D-East Lansing), does not. But the older I get, the less convinced I am that any politician has what it takes or brings to the table what’s needed to solve our problems and enhance our quality of life.

I may be wrong about Enderle, though.

Lance Enderle

I met him in a local coffee shop a few months ago – an unscrupulous door-to-door canvasser had fraudulently added my name to a petition for one of Enderle’s challengers so I agreed to sign an affidavit to this effect (nothing came of it, thanks to lazy state bureaucrats) – and we’ve since sent e-mails and Facebook messages back and forth. Although I’ve met more elected officials and candidates than I can count in my 29 years in politics, few have impressed me as much as Enderle. Not only is he well-versed in the issues facing this district and the nation, but he seems to have the drive (aka “fire in the gut”) needed to tackle the challenges we face and the scruples needed to ensure that he remains committed to his constituents.

Rogers, a former G-Man who hails from Livingston County – where my first ex-wife is from – is a rabidly-partisan, solidly-conservative zealot who to my knowledge has never cast a vote with which I would agree. He co-sponsored the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act, which seems stupid and invasive to me, voted against expanding embryonic stem cell research and voted to allow electronic surveillance without a warrant. He voted to terminate public funding for National Public Radio, supported building a fence along the Mexican border, opposed increasing the minimum wage and supported tax breaks for religious organizations.

Mike Rogers

A backer of Dubya and a staunch supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rogers opposed redeploying U.S. troops out of Iraq in May 2007 and voted against removing U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan in March of 2011 as well. Not only is he pro-military, pro-gun and pro-life, but he’s anti-civil rights, anti-Obamacare, anti-renewable energy and anti-union. I could go on but won’t; consider this quote from a fellow blogger instead:

Rogers is one of the most bought-off politicians by Big Business of any congressman in either party. And he serves their interests well – much to the detriment of his central Michigan constituents.

Even Republican Dick Chrysler, who represented me in Congress briefly in the mid-1990s and who wanted to make it harder to appeal the death penalty and easier to spend billions on defense, was more palatable than Rogers.

Enderle, on the other hand, refuses to accept corporate contributions, supports fair trade and not free trade, wants to spend more money on jobs and infrastructure, and opposes the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans.

A special education teacher, he wants to invest in our public schools and universities (he knows firsthand why we need to get away from teaching to the test and get back to teaching our students), opposes fracking, is anti-war, and wants to strengthen Medicare and Social Security, not privatize them. Enderle’s a charming but intense guy with a disc jockey’s voice who ran against Rogers in 2010 as a write-in candidate – and lost badly – but is running a spirited, cohesive, impressive campaign this time around.

He’s knocked on thousands of doors; has racked up a slew of endorsements, including the United Auto Workers, AFL-CIO, Michigan Nurses Association and National Organization for Women; and ran circles around Rogers when they debated in late September at Cleary University’s Johnson Center in Howell. (See this clip.)

Enderle’s no fan of the current Congress either. “We’ve had an obstructionist Congress bent on removing the President from office, not moving our country forward,” he told me. “When you are voting over and over to restrict women’s reproductive rights instead of trying to get people back to work, something is wrong with this picture. And Mike Rogers has been in the thick of this Republican obstructionism from the beginning.”

Partisan hacks like Rogers deserve the blame for the dysfunction in Washington. If he and Enderle were both in my backyard when a massive meteor plummeted to earth and I could only fit one more person in my meteor-proof bunker, guess who would get squished like a bug and who would live to see another legislative session?

For more information, click here.


Sources: Ontheissues.org, votesmart.org, Lance Enderle.