God help democracy

It's the eve of Election Day 2010, and I'm hard pressed to recall feeling so completely disassociated from the democratic process as I am today.

For the past six months, and starting in earnest in September, we have been bombarded by the politics of negativism. Virtually no candidate for state or federal office that is campaigning in the north country – nor anywhere else, from what I can tell – has run a positive campaign based on ideas and the explanation of a political philosophy. Instead, we have been fed a steady diet of pablum, pessimism and petulance.

There seems to be no lower bar under which no one is willing to go. From the state Senate and Assembly races to the race for the 23rd Congressional District, TV ads and fliers have bombarded us with misstatements, untruths, half truths and inane political promises.

The sole candidate standing above the fray appears to be 118th District Assemblywoman Addie J. Russell, whose ads have focused on her and not her opponent. Sadly, she hasn't gained any reward from that, as state Republicans and the notoriously upstate-averse former New York City mayor Ed Koch have smeared her voting record and her political honesty. Koch, who probably wouldn't know Addie Russell if he rode in an elevator with her, actually called her a "bum" for refusing to sign his pledge to reform Albany, a move that Ms. Russell defended, correctly to my mind, by saying mindless pledges to support inspecific causes are, well, mindless. Who, actually, is the bum here?

Other candidates have not been reluctant to smear their opponents with half-truths, lies and damned lies. Darrell Aubertine's supporters (through the state Senate Democrats) accused Pattie Ritchie of "doubling the clerk's budget" – without noting, of course, that she did that in order to put her department in the black, taking in more money than it costs. Ritchie's crowd (through the Senate Republicans) has called Darrel the lapdog of the downstate Democrats, ignoring his Herculean and successful effort to beat back a farm-labor bill that could have had devastating effect on the north country's agricultural industry, a bill that was the prom date of downstate Democrats. Darrel also was instrumental in Power for Jobs, a bill that will allow some of the power generated here on the St. Lawrence River to stay upstate – when the incessant sucking sound you hear is the downstate power grid, trying to leave rural New York with little or nothing.

The Doheny crowd has decided that their candidate is actually running against a female California representative – Nancy Pelosi – and not Bill Owens, owner at least for now of the 23rd district seat. Or so you would think, if you listened to Doheny ads from any number of sources. Of course, the candidate has leapt on this bandwagon with a zealous alacrity, having invoked Pelosi's name roughly as often as he has said "Owens." Probably more, since he also says "Pelosi" any time he says "my opponent."

And, not to be undone, one Owens ad accused Doheny of trashing 400 jobs at Adelphia Cable, when in reality, Doheny's company almost certainly rescued all the other Adelphia jobs by pulling the company out of certain disaster at the hands of its criminally unscrupulous owners.

It goes on and on without cease. Only the politicians with safe or ridiculously safe leads – Andrew Cuomo, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer – appear to have the luxury of actually talking about policy. Neither Gillibrand's nor Schumer's ads have even acknowledged an opponent, which has been a winning formula for the front runners. By ignoring them, they have marginalized their opponents right out of the race. The state Democratic Committee has eviscerated Cuomo opponent Carl Palladino, but c'mon – who could resist?

Through all this, we're being cheated. We are being fed sound bites and irrelevant statements about "values" (when I hear a candidate seeks support for a personal asset that is indefinable, immeasurable and amorphous, I cringe) and campaign pablum and outright lies, making it impossible to select a candidate based on where he or she stands in relation to his or her opponent. At the polls, we are reduced to voting based on our general impressions of a candidate, or, God forbid, their party affiliation. This is no way to select a government.

There is no easy solution to this, short of a real grass-roots movement to tell candidates to cut it out. Sadly, our level of civic engagement has dropped precipitously (perhaps in response to the garbage the politicians are trying to feed us) and without that, our elected officials are going to pay more attention to their professional "spin-masters" than they are to us. God help Democracy.