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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Marcus: The nonsense of candidates is disrespectful to voters

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The closing days of a closely fought election rarely offer uplifting moments, but the 2014 season has been particularly dreary, nearly devoid of content and high on unedifying spectacle.

Perhaps the iconic moment came when former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist faced an empty lectern for seven minutes while his Republican opponent, incumbent Gov. Rick Scott, sulked over Crist’s insistence that he have a cooling fan at his stand. Seriously, seven minutes. At which point Scott blinked and the debate that voters deserved could finally start.

But behavior that disrespects voters knows no partisan label. Consider Kentucky Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes’ steadfast refusal to say whether she voted for President Obama. Grimes, seeking to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has obviously judged that the cost of ducking this reasonable question is less than the damage of offering an answer that would, presumably, align her with the president. This strikes me as the wrong calculation: The voters who would be alienated by a straightforward answer are probably already lost to Grimes, but I can imagine wavering voters being turned off by her dodginess.

Even worse is Grimes’ sanctimonious effort to wrap her evasiveness in patriotic bunting, the “sanctity of the ballot box” and the privacy protections for voters enshrined in the state constitution. “This is a matter of principle,” Grimes said in a debate Monday. “I’m not going to compromise a constitutional right provided here in Kentucky in order to curry favor on one or the other side or for members of the media.”

Spare me. Sure, the average citizen has every right to tell reporters to buzz off when asked how they cast their vote. But a politician whose job entails campaigning for politicians of her party? Who was an Obama delegate to the national convention? Who was all too happy to disclose the fact of her vote for Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic primaries?

Disrespectful to voters

In the same category of behavior disrespectful to voters I’d put the refusal of Kansas Senate candidate Greg Orman to tell the people of his state which party he supports. Orman, hoping to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, has said he would caucus with whichever party turns out to hold the majority. Indeed, Orman manages to out-Grimes Grimes: While she won’t say who she voted for in private, he doesn’t want to talk about who he’ll vote with in public.

Asked recently whether he owed the voters of Kansas an answer about which party he’d support, Orman non-answered, “I sort of reject the premise of that question. . . . I think it’s an opportunity for Kansas to define the agenda in the United States Senate.” This is “Let’s Make a Deal” politics, with voters relegated to guessing what’s behind door No. 3.

Not that the major party candidates are covering themselves with glory this cycle. The Republican strategy boils down to yoking your Democratic opponent as tightly as possible to Obama. The champion may be North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis, who managed, in the course of an hour-long debate with incumbent Kay Hagan, to cram in 10 references to her voting with Obama 96 percent of the time.

In a debate last week in Louisiana, Republican Bill Cassidy said of incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu, “She represents Barack Obama, I represent you.”

The Democratic response is essentially: Barack who? Thus Landrieu’s retort: “While President Obama is not on the ballot, the future of Louisiana is.”

Perhaps campaigns are like childbirth: There is a natural human tendency to forget the nonsense (in the case of elections) or the pain (in the case of both elections and childbirth). But this one may take longer than the usual two years to forget.

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