Election time: A moral dilemma

So it's Super Tuesday and Texas' own primary is just under a month away. There's all manner of local political theorizing that perhaps, for once, Texas could "decide this whole thing." I'm hardly convinced.

This great big red state's hardly been a battleground. Sure there are traditional pockets of blue--Austin and El Paso, but with Bush's stamp on the state for the last four presidential elections (first as 'guberner', then as pres), Democrats hadn't even bothered to give more than a cursory "keep fighting the good fight" glance to its Texas supporters.

Yes, I know that the presidential election isn't everything, and that our lives are touched more often by local, county, and state politicians than the empty promises of the Executive Office. Still, it would be nice to experience an election season in one of those swing states that seem to get all the press and the pressing of the flesh by every possible candidate from day one. If Texas is going to decide this thing--either at the party level for nominations or in November for the big dance--we may have to do it mostly on our own.

I'm being asked often who I plan to vote for and my honest answer is still "I don't know." I have problems with Hillary. I have problems with Obama. And before you ask for confirmation, yes I lean to the left, but if Giuliani didn't have skeletons in his closet to make the devil himself blush and could have actually mounted a real run, I just might have voted for him. Instead, in the first election of my adult years where there were actually a number of viable Democrat candidates, I don't feel terribly good about anyone.

I want to be passionate about a candidate, dammit! I want to believe in someone, not just choose out of desperation. I'd vote for Hilary if she weren't the wife of a former President. I'd vote for Obama if he weren't so celebrity slick and so wet behind the ears. On the day of the primaries, it may come down to a coin toss for me. I only wish I were joking.

I think that if I could believe that either of the candidates hadn't twisted rules and told lies daily to get where they are, I'd be willing to take the risk. But I don't believe it. I know better. Politics is messy and it's easier to participate if moral ambiguity is one of the special skills you can list on your resume. If you play by the rules, if you never stoop to the level of loopholes and half-truths, if you aren't just someone with the potential to be good, but the conviction that integrity means more than winning...well, you rarely win. As soon as you say "I won't go there" a competitor gleefully says "I will" and you and your high ideals and morality are left in the dust.

So where does that leave us, the voting public, when it comes to choosing our supposed leaders? If we look askance at every candidate, trying only to choose the lesser of evils, how does government ever become anything but a necessary one?

Back home in El Paso, the grey area of "anything for the greater good" and "oh, that's just politics" is playing out very close to me. Political corruption has been increasingly in the local press there over several years. And I mean, serious, old school, vote-buying corruption. So now at a time when the city needs its faith in the political process rebuilt, and when the next generation coming of age could actually help in that effort, its politically ambitious are only following the old guard.

Here's the story. Dee Margo, husband to Adair Margo of the Adair Margo Gallery (local art gallery in El Paso) and arguable gal pal of First Lady Laura Bush, is running for State Representative against the incumbent Pat Haggerty. The shadiness in this story begins before we even get into any mud slinging. You see, as reported by the El Paso Times and Newspaper Tree of El Paso (see links below), Margo conveniently took up a second residence or "moved his residence", or however you'd like to label the maneuver, in order to become eligible to run in Haggerty's district. It's an old move, one that political parties often encourage and facilitate in order to position viable candidates in key races. I would argue, though, that a tradition of rule twisting doesn't make it right.

In another district, the local race for city councilman/woman/person has multiple candidates who twisted, or who are claiming to have twisted, the same rule to be eligible to run in that district. One of those latter candidates is my soon to be ex-husband. The El Paso Times has called him out repeatedly for this Margo-like maneuver.

Now before the jokes start to fly about hell having no fury, I should say that I believe strongly that my husband--or at least the man I knew as my husband--could truly do a great deal of good for the city, for the district that he grew up in, and could be a major force for energizing and engaging the youth of El Paso in city life and the political process in general. I know that he loves the city, always has; he cares about his old neighborhood and the many generations of families living there. I know that he has the potential to be a great local leader and to affect change for the better.

However, I also know that he doesn't meet all of the residency requirements to run right now. That fact, that attempt to sneak through the loophole and its implications for personal integrity, rather overshadow his potential and his promise. Instead of being a passionate, energetic, sincerely and selflessly concerned candidate who stands away from the expected shadiness of a Dee Margo, he seems just another candidate whose intentions are called into question, whose motives can only be doubted, a candidate no better or worse than any other.

And so I'm left wondering how that microcosmic example plays out at the presidential level. In the end, whether I vote for Obama or Clinton, whether a Republican or a Democrat gains the top office, will it really make any difference? If the prim-rose path is the same for every candidate, whether they've already walked it or are just a few steps in, then no matter who wins the election, we, the public, have already lost.

Like the generations before me, perhaps I should just put my hope in the next one.

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http://www.newspapertree.com/politics/1803-the-inner-loop-11-11-07

http://www.newspapertree.com/politics/2019-moreno-marquez-haggerty-and-margo

http://www.newspapertree.com/politics/2043-haggerty-and-margo-debate

District 3 race gets new candidate, same residency concerns

Who cares where politicians live?

Race for City Council's 3rd District draws second candidate