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Okay, I'm as sick of politics as the next guy, but it's hard to think about much else at the moment. We just endured the most expensive election in history, and the result is that nothing has changed.
Republicans still run the U.S. House and Senate, an alleged Democrat is still President, and the Colorado General Assembly will continue to make our state safe for more suburban sprawl.
That prospect will attract more migrating right-thinking Californians who should then soon be able to finish their noble task of purifying Colorado.
Believe it or not, our state once had labor organizers and single-parent households, ma-and-pa enterprises, evolutionists, speakers of unofficial languages, hardscrabble ranchers and subsistence farmers who persist in using water that could grow condos, financially challenged unemployables -- all sorts of riff-raff who stood in the way of converting Colorado into Orange County East.
Granted, Bob Dole did tell us that if Bill Clinton got re-elected, the emboldened second-term president would abandon the War on Drugs, appoint judges who had read the Bill of Rights, and promote one of those horrible single-payer health-care systems.
Scary thought, but then again, there's a Republican congress to temper those alleged presidential temptations and preserve our traditional plutocratic way of life.
Every election inspires thoughts of campaign reform, of course, and it's time to consider some of these:
· Require that all political organizations using
the word Christian
actually promote the teachings
and lifestyle of Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded in the
Gospels.
This means no more bashing the poor and unemployed, since it is not written that Jesus ever held a job or owned property. It means no school prayer, since Jesus told his followers to pray in closets. It means forgiving enemies and turning the other cheek.
Jesus was pretty clear about all that.
If Christians want to use the Bible, specifically the abominations of homosexuality specified in Leviticus, as the basis for structuring our society, then they should have to follow them all -- no more shellfish, no more clothing woven from two kinds of cloth, no more charging interest.
That is, anybody who opposes homosexuality on biblical grounds should also be required to picket Red Lobster, most department stores and every bank, since those are also sites of levitical abominations.
· Put the actual candidate on the ballot. During the course of this campaign, I spoke to Dick Wadhams. He's intelligent and witty, quite perceptive about Colorado and our political issues.
Many other journalists also spoke to Wadhams -- he was quoted, often extensively, in story after story about the U.S. Senate race. Always he came across quite well.
Come election day, I wanted to vote for Wadhams. But I couldn't, since he wasn't on the ballot. Wadhams, perhaps the most-quoted luminary in this campaign, was always speaking for Wayne Allard.
This isn't right. Why should we send a guy who seems to think like Wadhams to the Senate, when an honest election would have sent Wadhams to the Senate? Clearly, some reform is in order.
· No more term limits. Retailers used to joke
that if you can't sell it, paint it red and send it to
Nebraska.
Now political consultants must joke that if you can't
get people to go along with something bizarre like a new
federal constitutional convention, just call it Term
Limits, and it'll pass in Colorado.
In 1998, we'll probably see things like the Subdividers Bill of Rights, the Highway Construction Tax and the Universal Urine Test on the ballot -- except they'll all be called term-limit provisions unless this reform is adopted.
· Remove medicine from politics. Many of our most divisive issues -- tobacco, abortion, drugs -- are, at heart, medical questions concerning what procedures physicians may perform and what medications they may prescribe.
They're really not issues that our political system, which is based on compromise between competing interests, is equipped to solve. So why even try?
· No more values. I start to gag every time I
hear a candidate talking about important it is to elect
someone who shares our values.
Look, most of us value things like having some time to loaf among friends or spending our evenings at home with the family.
We do not value activities like rubber-chicken dinners or hanging out with lobbyists and bagmen in the state or national capital. Yet those are the activities that a successful candidate must indulge in.
It is thus impossible for any candidate to share our
values (if we had those values, we'd be candidates, too),
and campaign reform should start with values
from
the political lexicon.
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