“Awww, but those shows all look so crummy.” – Homer Simpson “Well we can dress it up a bit, we can bring a fern, and a folding chair from the garage and the most decorative thing of all, the truth.” – Marge Simpson
I voted yesterday, it was non-presidential primary day. The ballot was headed by the United States Senate and at the very bottom was Drain Commissioner. Most of the races were heavily entrenched incumbents running unopposed. I never vote in uncontested races, there’s something creepy about it, so the better half of my ballot was turned in blank. Of course no one but me knew that I’d barely voted and, sure enough, on my way out the door one of the nice geezers running polling station handed me one of those ridiculously stupid “I Voted” stickers, referring to it as my “reward”. Fuck those stickers.
There is something phenomenally dreary about local politics. The big elections, the federal and gubernatorial ones, have sleek blondes and chisel jawed anchormen talking about them on television, plus you can go on-line and find witty pundits arguing over the daily mud slinging. To some extent that’s what politics means to a lot of people: video clips and commentary. On that lofty level the nitty gritty stuff, shaking hands and kissing babies (which I suppose is better than kissing hands and shaking babies), is done out of kabuki dedication to the commentary and video crowd. It’s an exercise politicians have to go through, but the real benefit comes from the presence of cameras.
Things are different at the local level. Shoe-leather politics, spending weeknights knocking on doors and Saturday mornings handing out fliers at farmer’s markets, are the meat of the campaign. The amount of money raised and spent is tiny and only a small fraction of voters are even aware that there’s a campaign occurring. The ground floor of electoral government has an unmistakable cable access quality to it.
That cable access feeling is the great barrier which local politics can only rarely transcend. After all, if it looks and feels like AA baseball, it probably is AA baseball. These guys are a long way from the majors and there’s a reason: the lawn signs are crudely designed, the speeches are stilted, and the campaign websites (if they exist at all) are technically reminiscent of 1999 and grammatically reminiscent of the ninth grade.
Rallies aren’t events in the way we’re used to thinking of events. If you go to a big time sporting event or a concert there’s people telling you where to park and concession stands and all kinds of other infrastructure that lets you – the ordinary person – know that someone serious is in charge of this thing and that it’s important to a lot of people. But the few smaller time political events I’ve attended don’t rate the amount of excitement you get at a county fair. It’s usually just some schmuck in front of a microphone talking to a small group of semi-interested people and two or three really enthusiastic nutjobs who clap like they’re in a crowd of thousands. Nothing about the campaign looks or feels important.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. You could take comfort in the fact that local politics, while vital in terms of trash pickup, road maintenance and the like, doesn’t have a major effect on most people’s lives. Think of it as a hallmark of a mature and stable community. Or you could find it a cause for despair, tormenting yourself with thoughts of how much better your community would be if only more people cared about offices like school board and drain commissioner.
There is hope, I suppose. The internet cannot make things equal, but it is a medium in which the gap between those with money and fame and those without is considerably diminished. As more and more politics takes place on-line the presentation gap between your nearly anonymous state representative and the professional politician will narrow. It will never close, but local politics may stop looking quite so bush league to the ordinary citizen.
