Essay by Ed Quillen
Politics – December 1996 – Colorado Central Magazine
During the past political campaign, the big regional contest was between Ken Chlouber and Linda Powers for the state senate. It was the most expensive state-senate campaign in Colorado history.
Even though I like Ken, I felt quite sad that Linda lost. She worked hard on our behalf.
When a county department of social services was getting out of hand, Linda was there to listen and then introduce legislation. When Aurora threatened to take water from Park County, Linda went there to explain how to fight the scheme. When people had trouble getting service from the phone company, Linda was there to help.
Voting her out of office seemed a shabby way to repay her for all that exhausting work.
When I tried to figure out the real difference, other than the usual partisan stuff, between Ken and Linda, I decided that Ken might be the better legislator, in terms of getting bills passed and the like, while Linda was an activist leader.
We were voting on a legislator, and Ken won. But I hope Linda stays active in public life hereabouts. This area often gets hammered, and there are occasions when we need an activist who knows her way around state government. In that regard, perhaps Linda could accomplish more out of office than in.
The big “last-minute issue” in that campaign involved a picture of a bare-chested Ken auctioning his shirt at a Lincoln Day dinner earlier this year.
The photo ran in the Salida Mountain Mail back then. It appeared again on a Powers campaign mailing which charged that Chlouber was an embarrassment.
But it was reprinted without permission. I thought Linda was wrong to use the picture anyway. That piece of political propaganda was a personal attack, and on shaky ground at that.
Most of us can be turned into “embarrassments” by such means, and beyond that, one big problem with our campaign system is that we don’t allow politicians to be spontaneous or human. They’re not running for the College of Cardinals, after all.
But I was even more annoyed by The Mail’s front-page reaction, full of pious hand-wringing about an alleged copyright law violation.
The simple fact is that copyright laws are rather vague, with common-law aspects and exceptions for “fair use.” I know that when I worked at The Mail, we violated the law on at least one occasion. Merle Baranczyk, publisher of The Mail, wanted to run a piece that I hated. So I tried to point out that it was copyrighted material and we didn’t have time to get permission. But it didn’t work; the piece ran.
Since it was a political ad, Merle figured they’d be happy to have their opinions repeated, and maybe he was right. But the truth is, newspapers skirt copyright law all the time. It’s a big, gray area, and like Ken’s “embarrassing” bare chest, of no relevance in deciding a state senate race.
Besides, the purpose of copyright law is not to suppress information, but to assure that writers and artists get credit for their work, and that they get paid and have some discretion over usage. Therefore, since information is usually involved, newspapers aren’t as clearly protected as novels, music, videos, and the like.
Thus, without risking copyright infringement, Powers could have traveled all over the district holding up that Mountain Mail and telling everyone that Chlouber’s picture was an embarrassment. Still playing it safe, she could almost certainly have used a picture of herself holding up that paper with Chlouber’s bare chest showing as large and hairy as life. (Although, of course, such matters are never really clear until they’ve gone to court.)
But under the circumstances, skewering Powers on copyright law struck me as getting her on a technicality — instead of calling her on resorting to nasty and irrelevant campaign tactics.
That’s assuming, however, that it was all right for Ken to sell his shirt. I think it was fine. But you can be sure that if I ever sell the shirt off of my back, I’ll wear a T-shirt underneath. Of course, that’s only because my bare belly is a far bigger embarrassment than Ken’s trim abs.
(And Linda, when a group of small-town Republicans doesn’t find something offensive — you should figure it just isn’t all that offensive.)
Anyway, although I was a trifle saddened by the election results, I was more saddened by how so many campaigns disintegrated into superfluous mud-slinging this year.
Another election outcome that saddened me was in Saguache County, where Bob Philleo was defeated for re-election to the county commission.
Bob’s one of the brightest and most perceptive people I’ve ever encountered in local government, and I hope that he also stays active in public life.
There’s an irony in Saguache County. Keith Edwards, the Republican commissioner, helped Mike Oliver launch a campaign against Philleo so that the GOP would have a majority.
But Edwards was defeated by Democrat Bill McClure of Center, so there’s still a Democratic majority. Edwards got Philleo out, which he wanted, but Edwards didn’t get another term either. Neither incumbent got re-elected.
There was some good news. Libertarian Carol Hill didn’t win, but she got a respectable share, 22%, in her campaign for Lake County Commissioner. The better alternative parties do, the better our political process.
I was also pleased that Jim Thompson was re-elected to the Chaffee County Commission, and that Carl Miller won a seat in the Colorado House. That may make me sound like an awfully partisan Democrat, but my voting usually reflects what I see as the bigger threat. If it’s big government as the threat, I vote Republican; if big business, Democratic.
This time around, especially after watching big business in action on the UP-SP merger, big business seemed like the bigger threat to our way of life.
From what I saw of campaigns, from county level to national, the major modern strategy seems to work this way: Candidate A accuses his opponent of being a “liberal” and Candidate B says that’s a canard and he’s really a “conservative.”
Yet this liberal-conservative pigeon-hole approach obscures more than it illuminates. I can’t even figure out where I fit, let alone somebody running for office.
Take some hot-button issue like capital punishment. I don’t like it, but sometimes it’s necessary for society to protect itself — what else do you do with a Ted Bundy, who’s a serial murderer and an escape risk? Or with a felon who’s already serving a life sentence and who murders a guard or another inmate?
I don’t like capital punishment, and I think it is too often applied to poor people, so I’m a liberal? But I believe it should be on the books, and applied on occasion, so I’m a conservative?
Or gun control. I’m an absolutist on the Bill of Rights, and the way I read the Second Amendment, every citizen has the constitutional right to own anything from a muzzle-loader to a hydrogen bomb.
But I don’t keep a gun because a gun is a major responsibility — I don’t have time to clean it, secure it, maintain proficiency with it, etc.
So does that make me a liberal because I choose to avoid firearms accidents by avoiding firearms, or a conservative because I’m even more hard-core than the NRA on Second Amendment rights?
Beats me. Do I think our schools should focus on “the basics”? Of course. The multiplication tables are worth millions of self-esteem enhancement exercises.
So that makes me a conservative. Except I also believe kids should learn biology and geology, and read a broad range of enduring literature — and that makes me a liberal, I guess.
This sort of analysis could continue indefinitely through abortion, drug policy, health-care, land-use planning, gay rights, and a host of other hot-button issues. But if I haven’t made my point by now, I never will — this “liberal or conservative” classification is worse than stupid.
And its effects are pernicious. If the pundits and pollsters announce that the electorate is in a “conservative” mood, then candidates rush to proclaim themselves “conservatives” and to denounce their opponents as “liberals.”
Neither term really means anything these days, and this leads to name-calling and innuendo, rather than any honest discussion of issues and policy.
And we in the media share the blame. Here’s an example. Steve Schuck of Colorado Springs ran for the Republican nomination for governor in 1986. He prepared acres of position statements, which received no attention.
One afternoon, to make some point about Democrats wasting money, he called a press conference, and started tossing money into a trash can.
That got ample coverage, even though the reporters later asked Schuck, “Why did you stage such a silly stunt?”
“Because when I talk about real issues in a sober way, you guys don’t pay any attention,” he said.
And he was right about what’s wrong with the media. We don’t devote the space (or air-time) that we should. We say it’s because our readers (or listeners or viewers) aren’t all that interested in politics. But we also do our best to insure that politics is a horse-race that occurs every couple of years, instead of a continuing discourse about the policies we rely upon to make our society work.
–Ed Quillen