Election Post-Mortems
It’s election eve as I write this and the airwaves are buzzing with the incessant last-hour blitz of campaign advertisements, all fast-edit glitz and smiling half-truths and velvet-tongued innuendo.
Not a pretty sight.
One has to sit back and marvel at the unimagined depths that Campaign ‘86, on both the local and statewide levels, took politics down to. Never in my memory have I witnessed such a mean-spirited, back-biting display by so many supposed adults--supposed adults who would be our leaders (a notion that chills me to the bone).
Senator, Governor, Mayor, Congressman, all you fine people who have gleefully thrown mud and half-baked accusations in this ugly, unseemly political war--thank you for such an insightful, if thoroughly distasteful, show.
I’m sure that the campaign of 1986 has etched as indelible a mark in the minds of high school and college political science students as it has in all the rest of us in the media-blitzed, bone- and soul-weary electorate (and more’s the pity for that).
MICHAEL K. WILLIS
San Diego
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