You may not be paying much attention to the election season shaping up for this fall, and you’re probably better off.
There is a rank unpleasantness in the air, a lowering of minimal standards, a corruption of the already benighted process of electing public officials.
Take the governor’s race in Georgia, where Republican businessman Guy Millner, among others, is challenging Democrat Zell Miller, an incumbent in trouble.
Attempting to exploit the image of “soft on crime” Democrats, Millner and his hired consultants fashioned a TV ad around a violent attack on his daughter, Tricia, some years ago.
In the ad, Guy Millner says, “She was awakened by a man standing over her bed with a knife in his hand and a ski mask over his face.”
Tricia Millner says: “And I thought he was going to kill me.”
The ad goes on to insist that “keeping violent criminals in jail hasn’t been a priority in Georgia. If Guy Millner were governor, it would be.”
Strong stuff, particularly in a year when voters insist that crime prevention is their top priority.
The problem with the ad, however, is one of timing, geography and fundamental dishonesty.
Despite the clear implication that Gov. Miller-elected in 1990-and Georgia Democrats are somehow responsible for the horrific attack, it took place in the mid-1980s, and it happened not in Georgia but in Tennessee, where Tricia Millner was attending college.
Neither date nor place are mentioned in the ad.
Guy Millner’s spokesman explained away the cynical video stunt by insisting that, “with hundreds of violent criminals being released early … there are literally hundreds of incidents like this one waiting to happen in Georgia …”
There was a time, and not so long ago, when partisans in both parties would have yanked such an ad off the air, if only out of professional embarrassment.
Nowadays, however, there is apparently no penalty for this sort of chicanery. Indeed, the chap responsible for the Millner ad is a Washington consultant who was recently featured in Campaigns & Elections magazine as a “Mover and Shaker.”
In California, meanwhile, a former Republican congressman is circulating a letter suggesting, without a hint of evidence, that President Clinton has been engaged in a variety of murderous conspiracies.
As first reported in the Los Angeles Times, William Dannemeyer, who left the House in 1992 to make an unsuccessful run for the Senate, is calling for a congressional hearing to explore a series of deaths he somehow connects with Clinton.
“Since President Clinton had a direct or indirect contact with these people who have died, it raises the very serious question of whether he is involved, directly or indirectly, in their deaths,” Dannemeyer writes.
Not surprisingly, Dannemeyer starts with former White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, a boyhood friend of Clinton’s whose death a year ago was determined to be a suicide, both by law-enforcement officials and, just two weeks ago, by Whitewater special prosecutor Robert Fiske.
With a taste for conspiracy theories worthy of filmmaker Oliver Stone, Dannemeyer includes in his calculus the death of Democratic political consultant Paul Tully, who died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Little Rock, Ark., in 1992.
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Dannemeyer rounds out his field by attempting to link the president to the four Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents who were gunned down last year at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
Nowhere in any of this, of course, is a smidgen of proof or evidence. But no matter. Dannemeyer’s letter is in circulation, another Big Lie tossed into the witch’s brew of falsehood, innuendo and hateful speech that is befouling the political process.
There always has been enough vitriol and character assassination to go around in American politics. But, with the help of the nation’s tribe of political consultants, we appear to be descending to new depths.
Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan faced vociferous opposition for their decisions, but we are translating our unhappiness into a culture that dehumanizes those politicos who displease us.
Opposing their policy views is no longer quite enough. Bill Clinton cannot be attacked merely as a failed president, which at this point is an entirely defensible position.
No, in the words of one of the nation’s most celebrated evangelists, Clinton’s election “broke America’s covenant with God.”
That point of view reflects an absence of proportionality, an extremism that puts democracy in danger.