It’s official. I’ve decided against running for Kentucky’s 3rd Congressional District seat. For several weeks, I considered a campaign for the U.S. House chair occupied by Republican Anne Northup. And when I found out that LEO scribe John Yarmuth had tossed his hat into the ring on the Democratic side, my ink started to boil. Would I wait too long — perhaps until David Hawpe joined the party — and then be the odd man out among the editorial entrants in this spring’s primary election?
But this was not a decision to be approached rashly. So I grabbed a legal pad and wrote down all of the reasons it would be a good idea for me to run for public office. Then I jotted down the bad ones.
On the plus side: I would be a fresh face in Washington, where, God knows, the current cast of characters has overstayed its welcome. I would work to help write a new chapter in the story of self-government, build the prosperity of our country, confront the larger challenge of mandatory spending, break America’s addiction to oil and make ours a hopeful society — oh, never mind, President Bush already said he’s doing all of these things during his State of the Union address.
On the negative side of the ledger, I listed the things that my opponents’ opposition research squads might be able to uncover and use against me. This will take a few minutes, so for brevity’s sake I’ll lay them out in bullet-point fashion.
• My moral fabric will come into question when someone leaks the story that I have skeletons in my closet — in the form of a half-dozen Grateful Dead T-shirts — and was seen at last year’s Steve Earle concert at Headliners mouthing the words to “F the CC” and “The Revolution Starts Now.”
• My fund-raising abilities will take a huge hit when it is revealed that I always pay for my own rounds of golf. Even worse, I drive my car to the course instead of fly there aboard an influence peddler’s luxurious corporate jet.
• My crisis-management skills will be denigrated when they find out that I once lied to my wife about how long it had been since my last shower and then failed to deny all recollection of the matter or parse the meaning of the term “shower” until I was clean of the charge.
• My character will be challenged after it is discovered that I was a highly recruited high school football player who saved a few games for my school during my senior season despite a major injury. I’ll be Swift Boated by some former teammates who’ll insist that I faked my shoulder separation and then grew my hair long and turned against the sport as soon as I quit competing.
• Someone will dig up a column I wrote 15 years ago in which I used the word “liberal.” My subsequent admission that I graduated from a school of liberal arts will come back to bite me when a pack of talk radio hosts start barking about my extremist views.
• When I refuse out of principle to use the term “judicial activist” to describe any judge who disagrees with me, my belief in the Constitution will be questioned. This will be enough to merit NSA surveillance of my cell phone and e-mail accounts, where it will be discovered that I once arranged to meet with a supporter across the border in Indiana underneath the poster of Lenin in the Red Room at Rich O’s Public House.
As you can see, I would be covered with mud. My message would never get through to the public, and everyone — me and the voters — would be further embittered by the process. The rising cynicism would then make it easier for the process to repeat itself in future elections.
How do we break the cycle?
One radical suggestion is to tune out the mud-slinging and character assassinations that are dominating most campaigns for national political office and discipline ourselves to consider the issues. These things will happen only if we voters insist upon them.
While we’re at it, we should underscore our determination that we’ve tired of elected representatives who engage primarily in power politics at the expense of genuine compromise aimed at the best interest of all Americans.
That’s what my campaign would’ve been about.
Or would it have been about defending my facial hair and Grateful Dead shirts?
