The Politics of Destruction

Dan Haley has written an excellent piece this morning in the Denver Post about the horrendous effect that negative tv commercials are having on our political process. Haley writes:

These grossly unfair ads only lead to a deeper distrust of government and politicians.

The ads are so over-the-top creepy and misleading that they begin to strip away a candidate's humanity, which makes it easier to hate them.

It can't be good for democracy if, by the time a candidate wins office, half the electorate wants to pop him in the face.

One of our letter-writers, Paul Kaempfer of Aurora, has grown so tired of political ads in the Senate race that he plans to cast a vote for a third-party candidate. "Congratulations to the campaign managers of both Ken Buck and Michael Bennet," he wrote. "They have mutually convinced me that both candidates are completely unqualified to serve as U.S. senator."

The entire process has turned him off, and understandably so.

So here we are, another year in which the politics of destruction has torn down two otherwise good men — both of whom are qualified and competent to represent us.

If there aren't some changes to the process, you have to wonder: Who in their right mind would ever want to run for public office?

When we moved out here to the country three years ago in July, we made the conscious decision not to hook up the television set for anything except movies we rent, so, thankfully, I have not seen any of these ads. I have long ago been turned off by the politics of destruction. Yet, the ads appear to work, in terms of achieving the result they are aiming for. But, as Haley writes, they are also, at the same time, achieving other results that are not good for our country.