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The
best thing the gubernatorial campaigns have going
for them so far? Nobody’s listening yet. Well, the
junkies are listening. The junkies always listen,
breathlessly, with palms that are cool and dampish,
but the people who matter, the voters of Virginia,
aren’t listening yet—and that’s a break, an
undeserved one—for the campaigns.
H.
L. Mencken observed that “Democracy is the theory
that the common people know what they want and
deserve to get it good and hard,” a good
newspaperman’s rewrite of Lincoln’s invocation
of the Almighty, when he said that his greatest fear
was that God is just. Both were more than a little
apprehensive about the idea that we do get, in the
end, what we deserve.
This
campaign that will decide the governorship of
Virginia began in a manner that was, well, Biblical.
See this set-up from the first chapter of Genesis:
“…without form, and void, and darkness was upon
the face of the deep.”
But
maybe you, foolish you, subscribe, not to the Good
Book, but to the Big Bang. The physics would still
fit, early on, as far as this campaign is concerned:
clouds of dust and gas—lots of gas—swirling
through the universe without form or evident
purpose.
A
friend of mine, who knows a thing or two about
campaigns, and a thing or two about being governor,
said to me the other day that everywhere he goes
people are disappointed in this campaign in general,
and specifically are disappointed by its lack of
“gravitas,” a Latin word meaning “heaviness,
or weight,” as in “seriousness.”
That’s
one of the reasons nobody is listening, this lack of
seriousness early on.
Virginians
looked up briefly from their daily lives and saw,
not issues that are meaningful to them, like
education, and transportation, and crime, and
congestion, and mental health and the environment,
and job stability, but squabbles over signatures,
and who can put up the most signs, and the way they
“tawk,” and who can pander the hardest about
spending more while cutting taxes, and they simply
looked away again, and went back to their daily
lives.
I
do have the duty to report to you now that even
though these clouds of dust and gas continue to
swirl rather desperately, it seems to me, they may
be, finally, showing some semblance of shape, of
form. A dividing issue—possibly the dividing
issue—of this fall campaign could be taking shape.
Is
“gravitas” at hand? It might be. This idea of
government by referenda might be the issue that
decides the next governor of Virginia.
It’s
got all the markers of an “issue” that could get
legs. It is simple. There are significant
consequences. It is reducible to sound-bite and
bumper sticker (“Let the People Decide”). There
are differences between the candidates. And it has
the two characteristics that seem requisite anymore
in politics. Does it pander? Does it insult our
intelligence? Of course it does, on both counts.
It
is still early. Maybe these clouds of dust and gas
will coalesce around other issues between now and
November. Maybe planets will form and go into orbit
around ideas unforeseen at the present time, but I
don’t think so. I think this may be the issue that
ultimately defines this governor’s race over the
next few months.
If
that happens, if that does prove to be the case, I
propose here a way for you to think about that.
Do
you favor government by polls? That is what
government by referenda is, in its purest form. It
is government by polls, no more, no less. If you
think that is how Virginia should best be governed,
then you will align yourself with the Kilgore
campaign, with the Kilgore line of orbit. If you do
not, if you think government by poll is a cynical
abdication of leadership, then you will align
yourself with the Kaine campaign in the months
ahead.
--
May 23, 2005
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