Last Election Spells What is Wrong with Our Process

In 1991, I ran for the State Senate. After working in political campaigns since the age of 8 and winning a seat in my local party central committee, when asked by my party to run I accepted. Growing up in the late 60’s and early 70’s I wanted to serve in office for the purpose of trying to make a change for the betterment of all people. I was not selfishly looking for power; I felt that I had something to offer. Today, people like me have become so disillusioned that we do not care who is running, let alone passionately try to make sure the candidates representing us would get elected.

The process of seeking and getting elected to office today is not what our forefathers intended when they designed elections through free speech and the right of every American to run for office. Today, it is all about money, which special interest groups could get elected and the power of advertising. If a candidate secures the “early money” any other candidate has no chance. If a candidate is secured in a “back room” by political hacks, any independent candidate has no chance. As a result, we now have a country so equally divided between two political camps that the country is actually less united and fragmented since the days of the Civil War.

The State of California and my city of San Francisco is now left with only one political party, which controls all aspects of government. This has less to do with the fact that the voter is only interested in electing one party than the fact that that party has done a better job choking off potential candidates of the opposing party that could win election. We ask ourselves during and after every election; why isn’t there any good candidates running? Often times it is not that we do not have good candidates, but that these candidates have been torn apart by news stories based upon half truths fed to the press by opposing candidates for the purpose of destroying them before they can truly get their message out. Since we vote on the basis of news highlights versus studying position papers, it is easy for us to believe that the press and television commercials must be right in describing who a candidate really is.

As a result of people like me dropping out of the process, everyday our electorate is making decisions that affect our personal lives and our businesses and we are helpless to do a thing about it. As an example, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a moratorium of the construction of new live/work projects for six months while they review the impact that live/work projects have had on the character of neighborhoods. Although this received much public attention in the press when it initially happened, the Board quietly without any fanfare made this moratorium permanent. This action eliminates one of the few development avenues that still make financial sense for developers while creating necessary living units to meet our continued demand for housing. By killing future live/work construction and with the projected long term softness in our office, retail and travel related markets, our Board has effectively killed commercial construction in our city at a time when we desperately need some sort of economic boost to save jobs while creating necessary housing.

We need to re-think how we elect our officials into office by seeking new bold ideas of promoting more people to not only consider political office but to actually get elected. We first need to take advertising of our politicians out of the process. With avenues such as television, radio and web sites, in an ideal environment we could eliminate all paid political advertising with free public service debates, personal profiles and the promotion of “position papers” that we can freely access as voters. We could eliminate the back room politics altogether by allowing anyone the right to run for office through a public forum. By Governor Davis not allowing the Green Party candidate the opportunity to debate against himself and Bill Simon, this was indicative of the problem. The governor wanted to make sure that this “minor” candidate did not have a chance to speak to the voters at large for fear that it could impact his election. This is not good for the rights of free speech; it is not good for our democracy; and it is not good for America. Jesse Ventura proved that an independent could get elected to higher office, but after one term of dealing with the realities of our current political system, he resigned himself to the fact that he could not make a difference.

We need to demand the enforcement of our rights for freedom of “true free speech” and the rights of everyone to seek to represent us in office. If we do not change our ways soon we will in fact no longer be “free”.