Republitics

I live in a conservative district. One of Congress’ most conservative members, John Doolittle, is our representative. He served a long time and then got caught doing something or other unethical. And him a Mormon! So he’s out, and we’re having a special election on June 3rd to elect the Republican who will run in November.

I’m not a Republican but I used to be, and I was intrigued that there was a candidate’s forum near my house tonight, so I went. It was very cool. Democracy at the local level is a fun thing to watch, because it is personal and it’s participatory. The major candidates (there were two) are so full of themselves and so full of shit (oops, I said the same thing twice), while the unknowns (two of those also) are nice and kind of interesting and somewhat over their heads. Everyone had four minutes to introduce themselves and two minutes to respond to questions from the audience. They occupied the front of a meeting room at the Community Center that had room for about a hundred people, and stood at the lectern when their turn came as directed by the moderator, one of those professional motivator / public speaker types, who handled the questions as they were brought to him handwritten on cards.

Hereafter, some impressions of the deal.

I’ve been physically close to a few established politicians – a very few – and they all have something in common: Their faces are extremely tight and closed. Politicians are the unhealthiest looking people. Far worse than, say, corporate executives. I was about twenty feet from IMC’s world-famous globe-trotting CEO the other day and he was fit and alert and rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed. Not so the first guy on our list.

Doug Ose moves slowly and deliberately. Nothing, absolutely nothing, about him does anything without written permission from the control center. Not his hands, not his lips, his eyelids, those cheek muscles most people can’t control when they’re nervous, nothing. He wasn’t robotic in any way. He just had a thick layer of absolute control over a core of absolute stiffness. The curious darkness in his eyes was explained by his penchant for using every chance at the lectern as an opportunity to say something critical if not insulting about McClintock, his major opponent. In his introduction, he referred to his opponent in the singular, artfully ignoring the other two candidates’ existence. Maybe not so artful: I heard a couple low ooh’s of disapproval. His background is of running a local family business for thirty years before jumping into politics.

Tom McClintock is a veteran of California politics, mostly from down south. What he’s doing up here I don’t know. But I have long admired his eloquence in defending firearm rights, and voted for him in the fiasco we had over the Governorship a few years back that resulted in us getting Schwarzenegger (who’s turned out pretty well overall). He looks the silver fox, but is very serious. He’s a fairly dependable Constitutionalist, but has spent his career in the minority party in Sacramento hence has learned to compromise in order to get anything done. He squandered no opportunity to criticize Ose – I felt the mean little dance they had was self-serving and unnecessary. He’s been a politician pretty much all his adult life.

Suzanne Jones comes across as the self-effacing heroine of a movie about the home-grown school district employee who just can’t take it any more and runs for Congress. She has a law degree and has worked abroad and generally comes across as a good fit – unless those wide staring eyes really do mean she has no clue and is rapidly making her answers up as she goes. If so, she did fine. I’d consider voting for her (if they’ll let me – not being in the GOP might make a difference), except I’m skeptical about “the conservative tradition that we Northern Californians are committed to” mentioned on her website. I’m from the Berkeley part of Northern California. The conservative traditions I’m committed to involve free speech, medicinal herbs and guns. Somehow I doubt that as a cloth-coated public-schools Republican she’s on quite that same page.

Theodore Terbolizard (“Terbo Ted”) is the dark horse, the libertarian Republican, and a very entertaining public speaker. But he’s not just a young Ron Paul. His bio speaks mostly of a life as an artist and musician, including work at Burning Man and at various places round the world. He’s energetic and unconventional, with an impish smile the fine suit cannot camouflage, yet at the same time very well-read, quick to answer and full of ideas. All the candidates clearly regard Bush and the current crop of Republicans in Washington as almost as big a problem as the Democrats, having led the country astray, but Terbo seems already to embody the next generation rather than a mere correction. In truth, if I’m allowed to vote, he’s more likely to get mine than any of the others.

The audience was mostly retired folks, with a scattering of young couples who don’t have kids yet. The questions were sort of a mixed bag: obscure local issues (“What do you think of the move to incorporate Orangevale and Fair Oaks into a city?” – none of them really had a clue), criticisms of Bush (“Has No Child Left Behind been a success or a failure?” – all but Ose, and most of the audience, thought it a failure), and generalities (“What could you do for our district from all the way over in Washington?” – this was taken as a clear chance to make shit up). Nothing about Iraq or “family values” or Obama, thank goodness.

The cutie with the cameraman saw me taking notes and asked if she could ask me a few questions on camera, so I submitted to be interviewed. Hopefully it won’t go on the air. I now realize she was just trolling for negativity, and I complied by observing how Ose and McClintock talked smack at each other and ignored the other two and it was a big turn-off. But I put it less eloquently and frankly, I’d rather not enable the media’s continuing obsession with undercutting non-Democrats, if that was her game. Maybe she was just looking for a story, in which case she certainly had to look hard at that place. We were a pretty sedate set of suburbanites, even if sauced up with bottled water and cookies.

Come November, their Democrat opponent will be Charlie Brown, and though Terbo Ted calls him an intellectual lightweight and a terrible speaker, there’s really no reason right now to think I won’t vote for him. Especially if he’s up against Ose and, as appears now to be the case, there’s no Libertarian running. (Here’s the last guy’s old website – he comes across as something of an intellectual lightweight too, unfortunately. “The price of Freedom is eternal vigal.”? What? Remember, folks, stupid websites are made by stupid people.)

I need a final paragraph to balance things out or something but I'm late and it's tired so g'night.