The devil made me do it

Those of us in the business of political pontification find it easy to blame the Koch brothers or labor unions or Supreme Court justices for the sad state of political hand wringing in which we find ourselves.

With over $20 million being dumped into the Alaska Senate race this year it’s getting next to impossible to make it through the day without encountering one senate candidate or the other jogging along a gravel bar or zipping by on a snow machine and in general trying to out-Alaska his opponent.

The fact is that the carefully worn Carhartts and grizzled, outdoorsy makeup featured in those ads is largely paid for by people who have never set foot in the state. Commence hand wringing.

It’s way too easy to just throw up your hands, wrung or not, and say those ne’er-do-wells with deep pockets are just buying the a senate seat for the Democrats or the Republicans and wish a pox on both houses.

In reality, the deep-pocketed folks are buying that seat from the ne’er-do-well in the voting booth. If you really want to get to the root of the dysfunction in D.C., look no further than the person staring back at you in the mirror.

We live in a representative democracy, which means we need to participate in the process. The fact that nationally only a third of the people can name their representative is very telling. Since we have only one representative in Congress, I’m sure the number is higher in Alaska, but I would be surprised if it was over 50 percent.

Awareness of the perpetrators in the Alaska Senate race, however, is probably much higher due to the flood of money spilling into our airwaves. And like most floods, this one is pretty muddy. How many of you think that Dan Sullivan is actually responsible for the rape of a child and the murder of her family? Or how many think Mark Begich was culpable in the deaths of veterans in Arizona? This is what is currently passing as information in the Senate race.

The truth is both candidates are qualified and neither one is going to sprout horns anytime soon. Ads that focus on personal attacks and exaggeration do rally a motivated base. They also tend to work when the rest of us are ill-informed. The remedy is to take a little time and get the facts.

If you Google Sullivan on the issues you get actual information. It’s easy. For example:

Sullivan on the environment: he pushed for a bill that would have streamlined the permitting process for coal mines and made challenges more difficult.

This doesn’t mean that he looks forward to a day when people living downstream from a coal mine can light up their bath water. It means he wants to make things more attractive for industry and in doing so make challenges to said industry more difficult. Concerning Pebble mine, Sullivan wants to stop the EPA from “pre-judging” the mine before it’s even operating. Again, he wants a business-friendly atmosphere for what could be a pretty lucrative business.

If you Google Begich on Pebble mine you get: “wrong mine, wrong, place, too big”. It’s a response that’s remarkably similar to that of the late Senator Ted Stevens who saw the mine as posing too big a threat to the Bristol Bay fishery — a fishery that supplies 25% of the world’s wild sockeye salmon.

Is Begich gleefully slamming the door on industry in an effort to please his liberal overlords? Of course not. He’s doing what he’s been elected to do. He’s making a decision and siding with the fishery. He’s allowing legal processes to play out that were put in place to protect his constituents.

On a women’s right to choose, Sullivan believes that life begins at conception. This view would criminalize abortion and make some forms of contraception illegal. He would also side with those who would defund Planned Parenthood and effectively stop or severely curtail reproductive health care for millions of women. This doesn’t mean Sullivan wants women barefoot and burka-ed. It means he has strongly held religious beliefs.

On the other hand Begich has made a woman’s right to choose a core part of his campaign. He was a loud supporter of a senate bill that would reverse the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, a decision that would allow employers to exempt women’s reproductive care from insurance policies. Does this mean that the Senator is a psychotic baby killer? No; it means he believes that those decisions should be made by the people involved and their physicians. Not by politicians or CEOs.

These are the discussions we should be having. Reasonable, thoughtful people with opposing viewpoints should be debating the issues that have an effect on the way we live. Instead, we get attack ads where issues are extrapolated out to the ridiculous. The authors of these ads are depending on one thing. They need the voting public to be disengaged, ignorant, and lazy. They need us to look no further than the grime-colored picture they have painted.

In order for this whole democracy thing to work we have to be involved. If we aren’t, if we let the Koch brothers of the world have their way with us, than we have no one to blame but ourselves. We will not only have the government we deserve, we will have the government we have asked for.