From Ugly Political Ads to the Beauty of the Return Day
Now that the long election season is behind us, surely people of all political stripes can agree on one thing: At last we’ll get a respite from the bombardment of attack ads, lies, and slimeball nastiness that poured out of too many campaigns.
The worst ad that I saw was not one of those awful screeds claiming that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim terrorist. Instead, the winner of the 2008 Worst Award goes to a local candidate right here in Austin: Don Zimmerman.
He’s a Republican who ran against the incumbent county Tax Assessor Nelda Wells Spears on a cut-taxes platform – which he took to a gory extreme. His ad depicted a man lying in a bathtub that was filled with ice and trickles of blood. He had just cut out one of his own kidneys, explained a narrator, because high taxes left him no choice but to sell his organs. The ad’s tagline was “Stop the bleeding.”
The kidney man lost, but such political yuck made me appreciate something that happened two days after the election. Out of Sussex County in Delaware, a bright glow of political sanity and even sweetness emerged. People there have a tradition called Return Day, dating back to around 1792.
It’s a post-election celebration in which opposing candidates for state and local offices join the public to hear the town crier announce the official election results. The former rivals are paired up to ride to the event together in horse-drawn carriages and antique cars. After the reading of returns, Republican and Democratic leaders jointly lower a ceremonial hatchet into an ornate cabinet. This “Burial of the Tomahawk” officially ends the political season. Then everyone adjourns to a big festival, with food, music, and libations for all.
How civilized! Every place should have a Return Day. Check it out: www.returnday.org.
Link Up With the Obama White House
If the sweeping vote for change on Election Day is really to bear fruit, We the People must be the ones who nurture it. We can’t just crank back in our La-Z-Boys. That’s because the business-as-usual crowd is waiting for Obama in Washington: Wall Street bankers, the war machine, 13,000 corporate lobbyists, recalcitrant Republicans, weak-kneed Democrats, the conformist media, and others. These insiders intend to shape his presidency in their image, stifling the people’s demand for real change.
We have to be the counterforce pushing insistently, vociferously from the outside. Who’s “we”? You and me – determined citizens, working through our personal networks, public-interest organizations, progressive media outlets, the Netroots Nation, unions, community groups, and other connections to grassroots activism.
The good news is that President-elect Barack Obama intends to open a democratic channel that will run from the countryside right into the government, using the two-way electronic pipeline of the Web to link you, me, and a mass constituency directly to Washington decision-making. He used this online relationship effectively in his campaign, turning what’s known as Netroots Nation into a prodigious political force that organized locally in every state, raised a massive amount of money, bypassed the conventional media, and coordinated its own actions.
This remarkable tool is now going inside. It’ll allow Obama and a core list of e-activists, who already number more than 10 million people, to communicate back and forth instantly, without having to go through the filters of the media and lobbying groups. One of the top Internet staffers for the president-to-be has already notified the activists that “the community we’ve built together is just the beginning.”
If you want to plug in to this grassroots self-government network, the digital link-up for the transition period is www.change.gov.
For more information on Jim Hightower’s work – and to subscribe to his award-winning monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown – visit www.jimhightower.com. You can hear his radio commentaries on KOOP Radio, 91.7FM, weekdays at 10:58am and 12:58pm.
This article appears in December 5 • 2008.