Sleazy Campaigning

Yesterday, with the election just a couple of days away, I received a sleazy campaign flyer from the Nebraska Republican Party targeting my incumbent state senator, Danielle Conrad. This slick document noted that she was stopped for driving while intoxicated just over three years ago (which I already knew), but was not arrested because state senators are "privileged from arrest during the session."

There are a couple of things about this that struck me as rather bizarre. The first is that our single-house legislature, Nebraska's Unicameral, is officially nonpartisan. I've been getting mail from the GOP regarding this nonpartisan office, so I assume that Conrad must be either a Democrat or an Independent. But I wouldn't know otherwise, because this is not a partisan position.

Of course, Nebraska is a solidly Republican state, even after the disasters the GOP has brought us in the past decade or so - and even after the extremist turn of the whole party in recent years. (I have a hard time understanding how anyone can still be a Republican these days. But that's another story.)  I don't think that there's a single state office where the Republican candidate in Nebraska is even seriously challenged, so they probably have lots of money to spend on officially nonpartisan races like this.

And the party really doesn't like the fact that we have a nonpartisan legislature. Indeed, they make sure that it's still as partisan as possible. Indeed, the Unicameral maybe be nonpartisan, but it's overwhelmingly filled with Republicans, just like everywhere else in the state. And that brings me to the second bizarre thing about this political flyer.

It doesn't actually claim that a drinking problem is reason to vote against an incumbent state senator. No, instead, we're supposed to vote against Conrad as a protest against the law that kept her from being arrested and prosecuted. But as I noted, our legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, and has been for decades. We have a Republican governor, too. If the GOP wanted to change the law, they could certainly do so. I don't think that there's any question about that. So they're urging us to make a protest vote in favor of the party that's actually responsible for this law!

This is just sleazy campaigning from the Republican Party, no more than that. Of course, that's no big surprise, is it? And in sleaze, I don't think that the Nebraska GOP even comes close to the national party. After all, they didn't actually lie in this broadside, as far as I can tell. For them, that's surprisingly ethical, I guess.

But another funny thing is that I know absolutely nothing about Danielle Conrad's opponent in this election, except that he's a Republican. I've been getting lots of mail from the Nebraska GOP, all loudly proclaiming the party affiliation of their candidate (for an officially nonpartisan position). But I haven't heard anything else about him - nothing about his political philosophy, nothing about his priorities in the legislature, not a single word about how he'd be a better state senator than Conrad.

Danielle Conrad actually came to my door a week or two ago. She was going door-to-door talking to constituents. But the GOP wants us to vote for her opponent based solely on the fact that he's a Republican. Apparently, nothing else about him is supposed to be important at all. I suppose we're supposed to assume that he's another conservative nonentity who will simply follow the party line in all things - like pretty much every GOP politician these days.

Well, the sad thing is that this will probably work. Nebraska is overwhelmingly Republican, and nothing seems likely to change that (especially after the Democrats elected a non-white President). And our memories seem to be as short as those in the rest of America. We'll see.