Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday

Today’s the day! Primaries in 12 states, including California. Of course, there are also a host of propositions that are, in some cases, pretty much impossible to figure out.

I’m always wary of propositions, because they’re usually end-runs around representative government that severely hurt our state. The prime example of bad law was the infamous Proposition 13 that significantly worsened the wonderful educational system that California once enjoyed. Where are we these days in per–capita school funding? Somewhere close to the bottom of the fifty states, I’m sure.

There was serious property-tax inflation in 1978 when Proposition 13 passed with 60% of the vote. (Interesting to note, that if the two-thirds vote required subsequent to Prop 13 had been required for its passage, it wouldn’t have passed.) I know, I know. You like Prop 13 because it saves you money, and those people who own their home and haven’t moved in the last 22 years are paying ridiculously low property taxes. A more equitable solution that preserved the quality of our children’s education should have been found.

Anyway, I didn’t want to talk about the propositions, I just wanted to wish you luck in figuring them out.

I wanted to talk about the Presidential Primaries.

Boy, what a kick this year has been so far: Bradley and McCain jointly taking on campaign finance reform, McCain recently taking on two leaders of the Christian right. Ain’t it great. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this since ‘68 when President Johnson decided not to run for reelection after Eugene McCarthy beat him in the New Hampshire Primary.

Of course, there have been plenty of low points in the primaries. Did Bradley really need to claim that he was a stronger pro-choice candidate than Gore? And when Gore was trying to make the same point over and over again, did he really need to say it more and more loudly, as though volume was proportional to veracity? And did Bush need to go to Bob Jones University only to claim later that it was a routine stop on his campaign trail, forcing him to apologize and stress that he wasn’t racist or anti-Catholic? And even though he was a prisoner of war for five and one-half years, why did McCain call Asians disparaging names, though he said, really, he was only talking about his captors?

Okay, but for all of these low points, real issues have also been debated, and voters are turning out in ever larger numbers. It seems as though we may be seeing a strong resurgence of democracy in the US of A. Talk of apathy? Talk of discouraged voters? Bah! Humbug!

But hold on.

By eight or nine this evening, after the polls are closed and all the projections are in, everything could be back to the same old establishment politics. Bradley will be out. (Actually, one wonders after his loss in Washington State why he’s still in.) McCain’s only option may be a national write-in campaign or the formation of a Reform-Party coalition with professional wrestler Ventura and super-model collector, skyscraper builder Trump.

We’ll be back to Gore vs. Bush. Big, establishment political machines will be jawing about issues that aren’t really issues, wasting our time and contributions to make sure, no matter what else we do, that nothing in our very prosperous nation changes very much at all. We’ll be arguing about who’s a conservative and who’s a liberal and who’s a big spender and who’s not Clinton.

More will become poor. More will get locked up. More will get shot. More will lose their jobs to the Internet or to cheaper manufacturing facilities overseas. Corporate welfare will continue unabated.

If Bush is elected President, you’ll get your tax cut on April 15^th and will have spent it by April 30^th, and who knows to what heights the national debt will once again soar. If Gore is elected President, we’ll have to turn down the volume on our TV sets whenever there’s a press conference, and the Internet will be the sacred cow that we worship.

Certainly, neither the Democrats nor Republicans will worry about campaign finance reform if McCain and Bradley aren’t around to force the issue, and that would be tragic, because campaign finance reform stands for a bigger issue which Marc Landy, Professor of Political Science at Boston College, described well (TomPaine.com, 2/28):

"[The President] must help people summon the courage to reassert control over their children and resist the appeal of money and professional advancement when those threaten to destroy family and friendship."

So when you go to the polls today, which I’m sure you will, consider casting a vote to keep change in the Presidential primaries.

- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.

Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com