A Wasted Election

November 04, 2014

By Wally Gordon

Usually writers know something their readers don’t. That’s why they publish. In the case of this column, however, everybody who sees it will know something I don’t: the outcome of the Tuesday election. I am writing two days before the voting and you will be reading it a day or more after the ballots have been counted. Of course, even you may not know by then which party triumphed. Control of the U.S. Senate could hinge on runoff elections Dec. 6 in Louisiana and Jan. 6 in Georgia. Power in the N.M. House may depend on recounts and court battles in some of the 10 closely fought districts.

This column, however, deals with one aspect of the election that doesn’t rely on the outcome of the voting because it has been preordained for months: This was a wasted election.

Elections in a democracy perform multiple functions. They, of course, choose those who will govern us for the next two or four years. But they do far more than that. They also set policies and establish priorities for public action. They both create and express public opinion on large issues. They set the direction of local, state and national government action. And they render a mandate for public officials that allows them—even requires them—to take action in our name and on our behalf.

Elections are, or should be, a time for clarity. Issues get debated, and candidates tell us their views and what they will do if elected. The major issues get sorted out from the minor ones, the urgent issues from the peripheral ones. The debates and discussions, the ads and the forums, the billions of dollars spent on electioneering help create a consensus that is ultimately expressed at the ballot box. That’s the way it is supposed to be.

What are the major issues facing New Mexico and the nation? Let’s take New Mexico first.

There is one overriding problem with many facets. It is the collapse of the state’s economy over the past seven years. You have to go back to 2005 to find a smaller labor force, and the number of jobs is only marginally ahead of 2004. Most aspects of the state’s economy, save two, are disintegrating—construction, tourism, housing, real estate, government, mining of minerals such as copper and molybdenum. Even education, supposedly one of the bright spots, is substantially lower than in 2008 in terms of per capita spending. Emigration out of the state exceeds immigration into it for the first time in memory. Every week, another longtime, well established business announces it is closing. Some malls are abandoned and deteriorating. Many people have simply given up.

The only bright spots are health care jobs, due to Obamacare’s dramatic expansion of Medicaid and an aging population, and production of oil and natural gas, the income from which has sustained state government spending at a modest level. While gas and oil production are booming, prices are not. Oil, which sets the pace, is in the range of low $80s a barrel, below the level necessary to sustain current levels of state spending without tapping into reserve funds, which, in fact, are exceptionally large.

What is most devastating of all is that every bad trend seems likely to continue into the indefinite future. As a wag once said during the Vietnam War, there is a tunnel at the end of the light.

So against this background of economic crisis, all of the candidates for governor, other statewide offices and the state House of Representatives are proposing well thought out, specific plans to get us out of our awful situation. Right? I wish. Susana Martinez’s website does not even mention the economy as among her priorities and Gary King’s only specific promise is to raise the minimum wage.

In fact, I am not aware of a single candidate who has proposed an overall economic reform plan—combining public and private actions, spending and taxation, education, training and commerce, incentives and promotion—that could plausibly lead the state to prosperity.

A few ideas have cropped up, but at best they are only a small piece of a policy. The most promising has been to boost early childhood education by tapping into the state’s rainy day funds, its two huge savings accounts financed by oil, gas and other natural resource exploitation. But no one has come up with a specific plan of how to spend the money. What does enhanced early childhood education mean? And what comes afterward?

One of the most popular education initiatives of the past half century, Head Start, has failed to fulfill its promise. It succeeded in raising the education levels of disadvantaged preschool kids, but because there is inadequate follow-up in the succeeding grades, the kids it helped often lose their edge and return to failure.

Or look at the national level where control of the Senate is at stake. Political ads, which have largely displaced in-person campaigning, focus on vague sloganeering, scandal and name calling. While bewailing what one candidate calls the “stink” in Washington, they only further spoil the air with dirty tricks, false charges and negative ads.

What are the issues at the national level? This weekend the United Nations published the fourth and last in a series of studies analyzing global warming. It stated unequivocally that science has reached the conclusion that global warming exists, that human activities, particularly burning fossil fuels for power and transportation, are the primary cause, and that if nothing is done we will have a vast disaster that will wipe out entire cites and countries and worsen the lives of just about everyone on the planet, including Americans. Food shortages, floods drought, mass extensions, rising oceans and disappearing glaciers and icepacks will be inevitable. So you would expect Senate candidates to propose what to do about it, to have a plan of action that they will seek to enact if they are elected? Yeah, fat chance.

“Time is not on our side,” the United Nations secretary general said. That’s an understatement.

The other top issues at the national level include immigration reform, which means finding some way to regularize the status of 11 million undocumented workers so that they are part of the American system and American society, not outside it in a no-man’s land that is dangerous for both them and the rest of us.

The third great national issue is the growing gap between rich and poor and lack of opportunity for all but those who are already well off. Nearly all the economic gains of the past two decades have only benefitted the rich. The middle class is stuck in neutral and the lower-middle class (it used to be the called the working class in those halcyon days when there were jobs for workers) is regressing. Ineluctable global economic trends are partly responsible, but so are a thoroughly unfair tax system, direct and indirect federal subsidies that help the rich more than the poor (the reverse of common sense) and a lousy education system that fails to lift the poor and the working class into the middle class. America, which likes to think of itself as the land of opportunity, now has less upward mobility than almost all other developed countries.

Is anybody on the campaign trail detailing policies to deal with global warming, immigration, and the gap between the 1 percent and the rest of us? If so, I haven’t heard or seen it.

Since these issues have been generally ignored during the campaign, how can we expect the winners in Tuesday’s election, be they Republicans or Democrats, to deal with them? Where is the popular mandate for action? Where is the consensus?

With neither mandate nor consensus, the narrow victors (and whichever party wins in Santa Fe and Washington, their victory is going to be narrow), it is hard to see how we can have anything but two more years of deadlock and inaction, two more years of vicious politics and vacuous posing. With $4 billion spent just on congressional races and billions more elsewhere, it would be nice if we could say at least that we have the best government money can buy, but nobody believes that.

Someday the people are going to say enough’s enough, it’s time for a real election with real policy choices and real decisions about real issues. Then maybe we will have a real government. Until then, good luck.

(Photo by George Larcher / CC)

This piece was written by:

Wally Gordon

Wally Gordon, who was for 12 years owner and editor of The Independent in Edgewood, began his career with three summer jobs at The New York Times while he was a student at Brown University. He spent a decade with the Baltimore Sun, including stints as national investigative reporter and Washington Bureau manager. He has freelanced or been a staff writer and editor for dozens of newspapers and magazines all over the United States.

Extensive travels have taken him to all 50 states and more than 60 foreign countries. He wrote a novel in Spain, edited a newspaper in American Samoa, served in the U.S. Army in Iran and taught for two years at a university in West Africa.

He is the author of A Reporter's World: Passions, Places and People. The new nonfiction book is a collection of essays, columns, and magazine and newspaper stories published during his journalistic career spanning more than half a century. Many of the pieces were first published in The Independent or in other New Mexico newspapers and magazines. The book includes profiles of the famous, the infamous and the anonymous, travel and adventure yarns, and essays on the major issues and emotions of our times.

A native of Atlanta, he has lived in New Mexico since 1978 and in the East Mountains since 1990. He has been married for 28 years to Thelma Bowles, a native New Mexican who is a photographer and French teacher. They have one son, Sergei.