Monday, September 22, 2008

Learning Curve

Since September 2nd, I've grappled with one major question: what does the outcome of the District 29 Democratic Party State Representative primary say about local politics? I fear that Mr. Cruz's sobering loss in the September 2nd Democratic Party primary speaks to our community's failures to forge and maintain an open and diverse Pima County Democratic Party, where local progressives, liberals and moderate Democrats band together to solve our community's problems, including laughable state spending on public education, disheartening unemployment and underemployment concerns, and serious misuse of our state's finite natural resources.

Yes, the Democratic Party's foremost interest involves electing Democrats to public office, but each and every one of us should scrutinize our electoral candidates to ensure that the Democrats we elect are the Democrats we need. I supported Ephraim Cruz because Ephraim Cruz is a Democrat who suffered for our shared ideals, who fought for those without power and privilege under our system. I never required the Democrat who simply parrots liberal talking points before liberal audiences like a patronizing Pinocchio jerkily animated by a low-budget James Carville wannabe in Geppetto drag.

Bottom line: a local campaign revolves around using political action to help one's neighbors. Most political candidates sound inauthentic, flat, and bored with their own dogma because candidates begin their odd sojourn in local politics filled with immense ambition and little else. Certainly Democratic candidates are decent folk who want clean air, low health insurance premiums for all and microwavable chicken dinners in every refrigerator, but most begin their campaigns with a benign abstractness about the entire deal, outside of their pet projects. Then they can't shut up.

You've seen the debate: Ephraim Cruz proves he's the world's foremost expert on immigration policy, Tom Prezelski hammered home his understanding of legislative minutia, Daniel Patterson emerged as some grey-haired mad scientist's experimental cross-pollinization between the AFL-CIO and Greenpeace, and Dr. Matt Heinz offered a wide range of sensible domestic policy proscriptions on all manner of serious local issues, all of which focused solely on his interest in health care. No money in the state budget? I'm a doctor. I heal people. Mining interests pollute the state's potable groundwater? I'm a doctor. I heal people. No money for public education? I'm a doctor. I heal people.

To attend that debate was like watching cable television with an eleven year old Halo aficionado raised on Pop Tarts and Pop Rocks. One second Jorge Ramos debates militarized borders with Lou Dobbs, the next Luca and Abby fight to save their newborn baby on a syndicated episode of ER. Somewhere in between flashes a touching tribute to Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, but that's interrupted to display gaunt and trendy Hollywood writers picketing and chanting to argue in favor of aborting your favorite television shows to beg for DVD royalties, and you close your eyes to forget the insanity, because no one's really talking about you!

Want to know what I learned? Our elected officials should reflect who we are and where we live. Anyone who purports to represent your interests should be able to logically and succinctly discuss those interests in public, and not himself ad nauseam. Local elections, in my opinion, are the largest contributor to voter apathy, because here the orthodox political commentary monopoly respects only pathetic micro-targeting and closed-circuit networking campaigns when candidates win friends and influence voters. Nothing more.

Average voters are not seriously asked to participate -- not by their local media, and not by their local political parties. It's not hard to get people interested: talk about what they care about, not what the Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood or the Arizona Education Association wants you to care about. In District 29, no one cares about the food you grow at home or the hybrid car you drive -- especially when a collegiate student body president is shot a few blocks from where you live. Don't tell me about the bed and breakfast statutes you've changed during your time in office when Tucsonans are laid off from their jobs all over.

Frankly, it became too simple to ignore the interests of the residents of District 29 in the mad dash to appeal to the small subset of plugged-in, Establishment Democratic voters in District 29. You can learn all manner of useful information about a place just by walking around the neighborhood, and I learned that much of South and Southeast Tucson present neglected neighborhoods, where people fend for themselves and nothing ever really changes.

I'll never forget: one Saturday my girlfriend and I canvassed Democrats in a South Tucson neighborhood filled with Richard Elias & Ramon Valadez signs, pit bulls, iron barred windows, liquor stores, and eight foot tall wire and iron fencing around every home. Every single home. You can't canvass folk you can't reach, and the dogs and fences obstructed more than we would have liked. Throughout that day, however, the Unisource Energy Tower, the tallest office building I've seen in Tucson, injected itself over these lower middle class homes, a mocking portrait of glass and steel opulence, Southern Arizona's answer to Mount Olympus.

That's the most galling part of this story. We Democrats know the local problems, and how to fix them. When schools suffer from anemic public funding and nonexistent public interest, we Democrats know who is hurt, and who is hurt most abundantly. We know who is most affected by rising gas prices and urban sprawl. We know who has health insurance, and who needs AHCCCS. We know that increased melanin content can decrease meaningful life choices in for many Tucsonans, statistically speaking. But we steadfastly refuse to discuss these issues during election season, to inform our fellow citizens of the reasons economic calamities befall them, and what they can do about it. We allow our elections to revolve around the simple and the mundane, the meaningless and the comical, the prurient and the personal. We cheapen the suffrage too many fight and bleed and die for when our politics devolves into the childish bickering and underdeveloped thinking that usually characterize local politics throughout our tortured and resilient county.

Seriously, all the election integrity advocates in Pima County have it wrong. I do not doubt their sincerity when they push for clean and fair and auditable elections, but the most glaring and serious threat to local democracy in Pima County is voter apathy. What Brad Nelson and Chuck Huckleberry do with the vote after its cast isn't really relevant when the vote itself approaches numerical insignificance. In District 29, 31,588 citizens are registered Democrats, yet only 8,797 voted in the September 2nd primary, with seven candidates. I toured polling places throughout District 29 on election day, only to find that with only a few hours left at some of the largest districts, barely fifty or sixty people total showed up to vote all day long. Really, if a voter didn't already personally know a candidate, or have some connection to the local Democratic Party or a local special interest group, chances are they didn't even know that September 2nd was Election Day.

Make no mistake -- Tucson Democrats rejected Ephraim Cruz. Out of seven candidates, Mr. Cruz won sixth place, only ahead of the nonexistent campaign of Gil Guerra. Our campaign visited over five thousand households in District 29, spent $21,875.00 in campaign funds, and mobilized volunteers throughout the blistering summer months to contact voters directly about Ephraim Cruz's message for change in Southern Arizona. Our mechanics proved effective; voters heard our radio advertisements, saw our television commercial, received our mailing, read our flyers, noticed our door hangers, and spoke with our campaign volunteers, often on multiple occasions. None of it worked.

Senator Barack Obama famously ripped author Alice Walker in a recent speech when he pronounced "We are the change we've been waiting for!" Maybe that's true. But we are also the problem we've been avoiding. Public outreach to increase both registered Democrats and voter turnout could provide the majorities we need in Phoenix to actually fix the public education and health care access issues that so plague this state. Get involved.