The Locality Of Politics: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Drop-In

A few posts back, I mentioned that I could no longer support John Barnes for state representative because of the vile anti-immigration flyer that we got in the mail. That left me with one option in the race for state representative in my district - Chris Swatts. The initial problem with voting for Mr. Swatts - and it’s a big problem - is that he’s a Republican. And yet, I was prepared to give him some consideration.

And then I got another piece of mail, from a Virginia-based organization called the National League Of Taxpayers. The enclosed letter indicated that I should take immediate action and call on John Barnes to submit his questionnaire - solicited by this taxpayer organization - indicating where he stands on various tax issues. The letter, without using the word endorse, praised Mr. Swatts for returning his questionnaire with Yes answers straight across the board.

I decided to see if I could find these folks out there on the Interwebs. Sure enough, they have a “home page” (linked above). I clicked on About Us and found this sentence in the second paragraph:

“Since the group’s inception in 1994, hard-working Americans have been forced to hand over ever-increasing amounts of money from their pay checks to fund wasteful arts, humanities and social welfare programs.”

Hmm..."wasteful arts” programs. Now...racist anti-immigration flyers piss me off. But calling publicly-funded arts programs wasteful?! That’s around the bend and beyond the pale. We desperately need arts in this country - as much as we can get, from sea to shining sea - because this is a country in which High School Musical 3 is the top-grossing film two weeks in a row and has the best opening weekend of any musical ever. This is what happens when schools across the country slash arts from their curricula and cities slash funds for the arts from their budgets. Larry The Cable Guy gets to makes movies. This is the point to which our standards have fallen. John Grisham is the best-selling author on the planet, and that’s just sad. Meanwhile, really great novels by authors like Ron McLarty, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and Richard Yates go unread.

Who? Précisement.

Anyway...arts as wasteful. That’s one of the more retarded things I’ve had the misfortune to endure reading. Now, since this wasn’t a mailing from Mr. Swatts, I decided that the only responsible thing to do, from a civic duty standpoint, was to put the question to the candidate himself. I sent an e-mail from his campaign web site on October 29th - a Sunday, giving Mr. Swatts the opportunity to repudiate the taxpayer group’s description of taxpayer-funded arts programs as “wasteful.” I got a response back a few hours later, and this is what he said:

“Yes, I took a stance to hold the line on any new taxes and increases. I very much support the Arts. I believe its important part of a child's education and building a better quality of life in a community. I actually was very involved in theater, drama and drawing during my younger years while in High School and College. I've always supported museums and local exhibits whether attending or through charitable donations. My difference, I believe it should be mainly funded by the businesses, non profits, and charities from the community. We as taxpayer's are forced everyday battling higher taxes to just meet some of our basic infrastructure needs and services for the city and the state. I don't want to exacerbate that with using additional taxpayer funds for arts.”

Not much in the way of repudiation there, eh? So what’s a voter in 89 to do, presuming they have more of a soul than, say, Voldemort? Answer: Engage in more civic duty.

I also had an e-mail out to the Barnes people, asking if the flyer represented Mr. Barnes’ true position on illegal immigration, and also asking about his position on taxpayer funding for the arts. I got an e-mail back from his campaign manager, asking for my phone number so Mr. Barnes could call me - because he “will want to talk to you about this as soon as possible.” Had I wanted to speak to him, I would have provided my phone number on the e-mail form. I’m not much for hob-nobbing, and networking, and all the rest of that crap. All I needed was a quick little e-mail back, saying yes this is me, no this isn’t me. I sent the message to the Barnes people the same day I sent an e-mail to the Swatts people. I got nothing back from the Barnes people until I got home from work last night and Amy told me that Mr. Barnes had just stopped by the house and would be coming back.

I was already in a bit of a tetchy mood at that point, but I gathered my wits about me and received the prospective state legislator. (About halfway through our talk, my mom and her brother, my uncle Steve, showed up, which made for quite the room full of people for little Jackson to look at.) Mr. Barnes had a copy of the hateful flyer in hand, and as he began talking, he tore the flyer in two, vertcally along the spine, creating two pages - one with the racist hate messages (the cover and inside front cover, which had the rhetoric about no gray area, no jobs, no amnesty, etc.), and one with the more modest proposals (the text of the inside back cover). He said that he had approved the text part, but not the cover part.

As with all of the other mailings we had received from the Barnes campaign, this one indicated that it had been paid for by the Indiana Democratic State Committee. Mr. Barnes indicated that he had received quite a lot more support from the caucus during this election cycle than he had during the previous election cycle - when he ran against entrenched Republican Larry Buell (who was at my polling place this morning - ugh). The caucus had approved the racist part of the flyer, and Mr. Barnes claimed that he had not been aware of it prior to seeing the finished flyer. He also said that I was not the first person who had called him out on it. The text part of the flyer is still a bit strongly worded, such as bits like, “John realizes that increased crime and drug trafficking are a major part of the illegal immigration problem.” That sentence has some truth to it, but in order for it to be wholly true, you have to remove the word “major.” It was good, though, to hear from the candidate himself that he does not line up with the kinds of people who vomit the racist garbage about no amnesty and no jobs and all the rest of it.

Mr. Barnes took responsibility himself for the flyer, calling it a “colossal mistake,” which was a pretty stand-up thing to do, since someone else drew it up. Do I buy the entire argument he made, standing there in my living room, that he knew about part of it and not about the other part? I don’t know. After all, he was a politician on the eve of an election, trying to win back a vote. I was mostly sold, though. The flyer of hate was so unlike anything else touting Barnes For State Rep that I was pretty sure from the moment I read it that the mayonnaise must have been left outdoors in the Copenhagen sun. I voted about four hours ago, and Mr. Barnes got my vote.