Wake us when it’s all over

Do you feel that, neighbors? It’s our excitement that this election is finally entering the home stretch.

We’ve got less than a week to go. And, quite frankly, Nov. 4 can’t come fast enough for us.

In some ways, this campaign season has been an interesting one. Locally, third-party candidacies made a splash, as Roger Purcell, Warren Keogh and Verne Rupright all mounted independent bids for the Legislature outside of the normal confines of the two-party system.

That kind of unconventional run was mirrored on the statewide level, where former Republican Bill Walker campaigned as an independent until merging his candidacy with the Democratic Party nominee for governor, Byron Mallott, to form what’s been dubbed the “Unity Ticket.”

But, in a lot of other ways, this election is more — a lot more — of the same old song and dance, and we’ll be glad when it’s over.

Not only will it be nice to finally be able to publish letters to the editor about something other than politics, but we, like you, are tired of the campaign robocalls, mailers and endless back and forth.

We miss watching television — or listen to streaming music or streaming television shows, for that matter — without sitting through campaign ads with grainy footage and soft-on-the-truth accusations.

We’re sick of mailboxes clogged with postcards in which candidates and groups supporting them have doctored headshots of their opponents until their skin is so pale and their eyes so baggy that they look like zombies.

We’re tired of people knocking on our doors.

We’re tired of getting calls at random times of day from Washington, D.C., area codes.

This is the world that unlimited campaign spending has brought us. We’re feeling nostalgic for the still-annoying-but-not-overwhelming campaigns of just a few years ago.

More than anything, we think this new reliance on campaign money demonstrates a stunning lack of new ideas in politics. For all this spending, all this intrusion into our daily lives, are any of us really better informed about the candidates than before the Citizens United ruling?

In this election, funding resources were essentially made limitless. This is more money than has ever been spent on an Alaska race.

And what did the pols and the hacks and the operatives do?

More mailers. More television commercials. More robocalls. More, essentially, of what they were already doing.

We don’t need to suffer through another election cycle to say the Supreme Court’s 2010 “Citizens United v. FEC” decision is detrimental to our form of governance. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion that declared “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

We disagree with the idea that corporations have human rights and the notion that money is speech. This ruling moves us away from the “one person, one vote” foundation of our democracy.

We’ve heard a host of remedies to Citizens United discussed at the state and national level. We heard another one this week, the idea that people should write to Justice Kennedy and urge him to change his vote and thus reverse the outcome of the Citizen United decision. There is precedent for this sort of recapitulation by Supreme Court justices, though it is uncommon.

We aren’t better-informed voters, nor did we get better candidates to represent us in office for the more than $5 billion spent on midterm elections nationally.

It’s time to clean up Citizens United, either with a federal or state-level fix. And this election is a great example of why that’s so necessary.