Campaign highlights, lowlights revisited

Mark Kelsey/Opinion

The sense of collective relief following Tuesday's election is practically tangible. In all corners of the Valley, campaign signs are being gathered up and put away, and life is returning, incrementally, to normal.

Before we focus on what lies ahead for Sarah Palin and the new Legislature, there's some good lessons - and no shortage of entertainment value - left behind. So it's worth one last look back at the just-finished campaign.

Perhaps the single most exemplary moment of the campaign season locally came at the otherwise disappointing forum put on by Mat-Su College. While most candidates there turned their closing remarks into some variation of a stump speech, Rep. Bill Stoltze used much of his allotted time to thank his opponent, Pat Chesbro, and to compliment her on a good campaign.

He noted, in a most gentlemanly and sportsmanlike manner, Chesbro's passion for the issues. &#8220We just have philosophical differences,” he concluded.

Sad that such moments of genuine good feeling among political adversaries are increasingly rare. But hats off to Stoltze for setting a good example. If more campaigns were run this way, people might take more interest in them.

On other fronts, it wouldn't be a local campaign for Legislature without the standard volleys being launched at Rep. Vic Kohring. The six-term Republican has battled some full-throttle assaults over the years, and this year was no different.

Also no different was Kohring's ability to rise above them. Despite his name being attached to the FBI raid in August, despite his unapologetic stance regarding the VECO money in his campaign coffers, despite allegations of inappropriate ties to an Anchorage developer, and despite the presence of a big-name opponent, voters sent Kohring back to Juneau for a seventh term by a wide margin.

Speculation abounds on the reason for this. But Kohring's personal charisma and detailed attention to his constituents and their needs cannot be dismissed as a factor.

Quick to take a phone call, answer an e-mail or help with a problem, Kohring offers accessibility uncommon for someone of his legislative longevity. His critics are many - including some within the Legislature's Republican caucus. But he sets the standard for responsive representation. And that generates the kind of word-of-mouth affection that can outshine many a negative headline.

At the other end of the campaign spectrum are those who can never quite have the deck stacked enough in their favor. It's not enough to have far more money than their opponents or to have all the strategic advantages that come with fealty to the Republican Party machine. If the slightest questioning eyebrow is raised about even legitimate issues, cries of &#8220mudslinging” commence.

Note to candidates and their supporters: Mudslinging is not the mere recitation of verifiable information you'd rather no one knows about.

When your opponent questions your sexuality or marital fidelity without warrant, or tries to, say, make an issue of a decades-old police record long-since risen above, that would be mudslinging. Simply stating that you may have voted to give the governor his jet, for example, when virtually every Alaskan was opposed to it, is not mudslinging.

But such campaign silliness was not limited to the local scene. Two weeks before the election, talk radio blowhard Rick Rydell announced on the air that he had &#8220washed his hands” of Sarah Palin because of &#8220disparaging remarks said about this radio program.”

Cue the crying baby.

Rydell went on, ridiculously, to mention his efforts to reunite the Republican Party. The only thing more absurd was the speed with which the Knowles camp circulated a press release about the incident, as if Rydell is somehow relevant.

If he, or anyone, truly cared about reuniting the Republican Party, he'd get behind Palin - and the people of Alaska - and be a part of the new day ushered in by her victory.

Which reminds me, lastly, that it would not be mudslinging for me to observe that while the new governor is standing up to the excessively partisan and crooked in her party's ranks, many, including some of Tuesday's winners, continue to embrace and enable them.

I'll close with my favorite bit of campaign hypocrisy - candidates who downplay or even feign ignorance of their own campaign contributors but want to define their opponents by who contributed to them.

&#8220Call a spade a spade,” Sen. Charlie Huggins said in an interview in another newspaper, in reference to independent challenger Jay Cross, whose financial supporters included - gasp - Democrats. I'm all for calling a spade a spade. I'm just not sure I'd be making an issue of a $30 contribution by anyone to my opponent if I, like Huggins, had accepted three- and four-digit contributions from Randy Ruedrich and Ben Stevens.

Spades, anyone?

Mark Kelsey is the Frontiersman's managing editor. Contact him at 352-2268 or mark.kelsey @frontiersman.com.