Before I delve into my disappointment in this election season, I must preface with one thing: current 3rd District Councilmember Gary DeLong and current state Senator Alan Lowenthal are two people I deeply respect—as with any public servant. DeLong’s moderate approach to Republican standards and Lowenthal’s dedication to education are attached to both my admiration and appreciation.
And that probably explains my confusion with the immature ways in which they and their communication directors have been running their respective campaigns for the 47th Congressional District.
There is a joke that, despite its simplicity, always makes me chuckle around election time: What are the only cold-blooded mammals? Politicians.
Though almost as bad as those cliché lawyer quips, the joke does have some grounding in truth with regards to campaigns, where the campaign heads for both DeLong and Lowenthal have spun truth, woven false narratives and been nothing but vicious and vitriolic towards their candidate’s opponent.
Since coming out victorious in the June primaries, the campaigns from the respective battlers have turned into nothing about issues opting instead for purely misinformed, oftentimes outright wrong attacks on one another that turn up the childish, baffling rhetoric to Yo Gabba Gabba-like proportions. For the last two months, those unfortunate enough to be on both Gary DeLong and Alan Lowenthal’s email lists have been caught in the middle of this childish back-and-forth, receiving notes composed by their campaign managers that address recent accusations, refute recent polls and twist facts in an attempt to make themselves look like the victim.
It’s not their fault, I know, because the system itself is vicious and vitriolic and it fuels an us-versus-them mentality where power is rarely created through ethical means. So I’ll acquiesce on the fact that campaigns are and always will be rhetorical battlegrounds and most politicians are, in of themselves, cold-hearted towards one another.
What I absolutely refuse to accept, however, is politicians acting juvenile. And particularly when it comes to a campaign to choose who will be representing our city in Washington D.C. I certainly don’t want anyone who would engage in such petty name-calling and immature tactics having control of our country’s wallet and our ability to declare war.
Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll have to budget in a sandbox in Congress for one of two people, whose combined antics recently culminated in a situation involving an aggressive videographer and a Kanye-style mic grab.
From the beginning, both candidates did little to set themselves apart politically. The pair’s initial debate in front of the Rotary Club on the Queen Mary in early August was dismally platformed-out—and reflective of the campaigns’ kettle logic—with neither stating anything of specificity or creativity in a time when both are mightily needed. It was less of a debate and more of a rhetorical sleeping pill.
Lowenthal often exceeded his time limit, pointing out endorsements rather than initiatives—”I sat on the California Senate’s education committee!” In case one hasn’t looked at the current state of our schools, I wouldn’t brag about that gift, Santa.
And DeLong offered cheap tokens of capitalist ideology to a crowd of business folk—”No more regulations in the private sector!” Wow, thanks for that mind-boggling thought that has never come from a Republican. They apparently don’t like homework—and I mean that quite literally.
On September 6, in response to a Lowenthal poll that placed the Democrat 20 points in the lead, DeLong’s camp sent out an email blast praising the almost 10-point lead they held over Lowenthal, PDF attached. Too bad data from the quoted poll had been released two months prior, with Lowenthal in the lead by four points. The new PDF showed that DeLong’s team had cherry-picked numbers from different segments of the already-released polling data and (without explainging the new numbers’ context) used them to draw a different conclusion than had previously been reported.
The opposing party is also not without sin. Take, for example, the tracker hired by the California Democratic Party to follow DeLong at his public appearances. DeLong asserted in another email blast to his list that he is disappointed at “the depths to which Lowenthal and his Democrat Party Bosses are willing to delve” when a tracker was “obtrusively intruding” on “Gary and his family [while they] enjoyed GreekFest.”
While a tracker—or a “stalker,” as DeLong’s camp later began to dramatically refer to her— isn’t Democrat-specific, maybe she shouldn’t be aggressively videotaping DeLong when his six year-old is around. But it’s not like it was just DeLong and his family out and about at the mall. Have a little intellectual honesty: you were campaigning, “DeLong For Congress” shirt and all. Hell, you even advertised it as a campaign event.
Lowenthal’s campaign strategist and spokesperson Mike Shimpock, meanwhile, didn’t just respond to the Post with a simple re-telling of the fact that trackers are common—y’know, with the dignity and respect of, oh, someone representing a state politician. He poisons the well, calling DeLong’s outcry “another display of Gary’s amazingly thin skin,” “Gary’s unwillingness to actually take positions or be held accountable that he is so upset by this,” and that “the party hired the tracker, not us.”
Ah, okay, now I get it: not only does DeLong’s criticism about a pervasive tracker somehow correlate to his inability to take positions (?), a Democrat running under and for the Democratic Party has no responsibility for the Party’s actions committed on the politician’s behalf. I didn’t steal the answers to the test, they were just given to me. I did nothing wrong.
Very much like when DeLong accepted the endorsements of rather extreme right-wing Republicans such as John Boehner and Eric Cantor but claimed, “They endorsed me. I didn’t endorse them.” I just take the money from the sweatshops, said Kim Kardashian, don’t mind the children. Lowenthal’s campaign attempted to hawk in on this—and once again, failed to point out the real problem with DeLong’s statement, mainly that it is disturbingly greedy to accept an endorsement from someone whose ethics you disagree with but whose media-friendly name will garner you attention.
Funny how guilty-by-association applies for DeLong, but not the Lowenthal camp when trackers are called out.
When Lowenthal momentarily backed out of the pair’s next public debate—to be held by the League of Women Voters at CSULB—DeLong’s camp sent an email to the press claiming it was due to “[Lowenthal’s] poor performance at last month’s Long Beach Rotary Club meeting.” Really? DeLong has a membership at the Rotary, an overwhelmingly Republican-leaning group, and hence why you often receive applause for stating Rotary-like mantras.
And Lowenthal’s camp? Zip. Zilch. Absolutely nothing—not even a petty press release to state that he wouldn’t be appearing. Perhaps it’s due to the rumors of “administrative reshuffling” that DeLong’s camp perpetuated? Who knows—either way, the campaign apparently realized the boo-boo and then opted back into the debate with, once again, not a single explanation.
That forum, held October 5, truly became the ketchup on the tots. Following the end of the debate, the tracker from the Democratic Party once again began filming DeLong and, unable to handle the towering presence of a five-foot-woman with a phone in his face, ripped it from her hands and and, it was believed, attempted to delete the video.
I understand that it could be deemed “irrational behavior,” as DeLong put it, but you don’t use irrational behavior to halt irrational behavior even when we all know it’s irrational behavior. You don’t steal a mic, even when we all know—we all know—”Single Ladies” was a far superior music video. But Taylor Swift is a human being, too.
Shimpock echoed—yet again—the same sentiment from the first go ‘round: “[W]e have no influence over her,” he told the Post. “But if he can’t stand the pressure at a debate with a video camera, he’s not going to be able to stand the pressure in Congress.” Do you not find, in the slightest bit, a lack of respect at having someone wave a phone with a flash activated within inches of anyone’s face? A comment about the tactlessness of such behavior, instead of excusing it, would have been far more noble. Is it nap time yet?
So before the bell rings on this tantrum that seems to be more between childish campaign managers than the candidates themselves, I’ll just say I’m disappointed. Much like when I graduated high school and realized that the dreamland of being a child was just that, a dreamland, I am looking around Long Beach, regarding the campaigns for Congress, not knowing where to go or how to comprehend such behavior. I know that the efforts of their communicating bodies has little bearing on either of the candidate as politicians, but it’s still frightening to be caught in a rhetorical back-and-forth like some schoolyard power struggle.