Learning Matters: Issues seem to take a backseat when campaigns heat up
“Keep your core tight, and don’t forget to breathe.” That’s the advice I’ve been hearing this past month at the fitness studio I frequent. And now that our local primary election season is over, the advice sounds useful for voters and candidates exhausted by the oxygen-depleting deluge of negative campaign mailers.
Core values tend to go missing as campaigns heat up — even as one side attacks the character and values of the other. So before the campaign for the general election gets underway, it’s a good time for a breather and a little reflection on what we’ve all just experienced.
MORE: Read past columns from Joylene Wagner >>
After voters were spared the bruising contest that would have been fought among Democrats had Mike Gatto stayed to battle Anthony Portantino for the 25th district California Senate seat, the California Assembly race between Laura Friedman and Ardy Kassakhian became the most vexing of the local races.
From the get-go, the contest was poised for friction between two locally-elected officials. But the Assembly race heated up even more when California Charter Schools Assn. Advocates and the California Teachers Assn. turned it into a proxy war in their fight for control of public education.
The two “independent expenditure committees” spent in excess of $1.6 million for and against the two candidates, with the charter school advocates contributing the bulk of it.
According to the Federal Election Commission website, FEC.gov, “In general, amounts spent for coordinated communications are limited, but independent expenditures are not… In general, a payment for a communication is ‘coordinated’ if it is made in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate or a candidate’s authorized committee...”
Without getting into the issues of charter schools or the need for moderating voices among teachers unions, there’s much not to like in the mailers sent out by these education interests.
For one thing, their mailers make it more difficult, not less, for voters to know the candidates or the issues that matter most to them. Most people have a hard time trusting the committees’ mailers are completely independent or free of candidate input.
Voters can quite logically assume the candidates share the goals of the committees that support them and will tend to support those goals if elected to office. But the mailers don’t even address the issues. They’re mostly personal attacks, misleading spin-offs of public records, with charges like,
“Kassakhian is a Republican!”
“Friedman is a Republican!”
“She’s only out for herself!”
“He’s un-Democratic!”
What’s a voter to believe when a candidate can deny all responsibility for such claims — or when so few voters seem interested in hearing the grayer but truer explanations between one extreme and another?
I’m sure there are plenty of Baby Boomers like me who grew up hearing witnesses on the television courtroom drama, “Perry Mason,” swear to “Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you, God.” But this campaign has devolved into half-truths and misinformation.
Rather than the free exercise of a vibrant democracy, fit to educate our children, this campaign has become an example of free and unaccountable spending amid blatant disregard for the honest give and take of ideas.
How can our children become the critical thinkers and informed citizens our state standards and local education plans envision if our adults — leading voices in education — are so reckless with information, so loose with truth?
I am not a Rotarian, but this election has reminded me of the importance of guidelines like the Rotarian Four-Way Test: Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
I think, too, about the old-fashioned sounding “objects and aims” of the Philanthropic Educational Organization of which I am a member, and the words which seem so pertinent now: “…To seek charity toward all with whom we associate, and a just comprehension of and adherence to the qualities of…justice and truth.”
They’re good words for the campaign workout ahead of us. I wish all the candidates strength for a journey of which we can be proud.
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JOYLENE WAGNER is a past member of the Glendale Unified School Board. Email her at jkate4400@aol.com.
