The day after Mike Erickson won the 5th Congressional District Republican nomination, members of his own party fretted that he may be too politically damaged to retake a seat once thought to lean to the GOP. Erickson emerged victorious after a bitter fight against rival Kevin Mannix, who made the bombshell accusation last week that Erickson had paid for a girlfriend's abortion. Erickson denied the charge, but it has carried enough credibility that he now faces a major loss of support from his party.
Those of you fortunate to not live in Oregon's Fifth Congressional District will neither note nor long remember the sorry excuse for a GOP primary campaign between Kevin Mannix and Mike Erickson. If you were unlucky enough to see any of Erickson's campaign commercials, you would have seen a man completely devoid of ideas and reduced to tossing mindless, formulaic bromides designed to appeal to the simple, the fearful, and the astoundingly ignorant and easily propagandized. It would be shorter and simpler to just call them "Republican True Believers".
Seldom have I seen a series of political commercials more disturbing and yet more indicative of our times. Mike Erickson is a Republican tabula rasa, a blank slate devoid of any ideas, problem solving skills, or leadership ability. What became apparent in his commercials is that Erickson is a used car salesman completely devoid of ethics, a grip on reality, and the ability to speak to the real problems this country faces. When your selling point is....
NO MORE HANDOUTS TO ILLEGAL ALIENS!
....you know that you've exited the sublime and found yourself in the fast lane on the expressway to the ridiculous. (And it's not as if Kevin Mannix did anything to separate himself as a clearly superior candidate....)
Let's face it, y'all; if Mike Erickson is the best that the GOP can do, it's no wonder that the party is such an irredeemable (&^%$#@ mess. When you're reduced to fielding candidates with the apparent IQ of a soapdish and the intellectual and philosophical agility to match, you have little hope of every truly addressing the very real problems this country faces. When you field candidates comfortable only speaking in sound bites that consist of fear-mongering and hate speech, you pretty much deserve to be cast upon the ash heap of history.
Until, and unless Republicans (and Democrats to a lesser extent) can find and field candidates capable of independent thought and leadership, this country will careen from one fear- and propaganda-inspired and fueled crisis to another.
I don't know about the rest of y'all, but my criteria is really pretty simple:
- Have clue- understand that about which you speak.
- Act as if you've actually spent some time researching and thinking about the issues.
- Speak with authority, and tell me how you think we can fix, or at least address, the problems we face. If the best you can do is sound bites and simplistic fear-mongering, you'd best just keep on walking, 'cuz you're not going to get the time of day from me.
- Convince me that you're actually running for something besides your own self-aggrandizement.
See? It's really not that hard, is it? Someone really ought to clue Mike Erickson and his ilk in to these simple realities. If you want to lead, then do it. You might start by stopping the pandering and fear-mongering. Of course, if that were to happen, Erickson would be putting out campaign commercials consisting of 30 seconds of dead air....because he seems to have nothing of any value to offer.
