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Drive a stake through the heart of poisonous politics
JUST AS IN "Casablanca" everyone comes to Rick's, almost everyone hereabouts sometimes walks the streets of Fredericksburg. On those streets, one is liable to bump into virtually anyone, and do so, despite differences of opinion, without blood in the eye. Maybe the rock-bottom definition of community is the disinclination to mentally assassinate others on sight. Beneath that is no community at all, which makes those who would upset this compact a threat to all.
The campaign to unseat state Sen. John Chichester, R-Stafford, by the boosters of his primary opponent, Mike Rothfeld, has been one long, shrill vilification of a serious public man who--agree or not with his politics--carries an earned reputation for devoted service and good character. The Chichester way is not one of venom. When in 1985 his handlers urged him to "go negative" in his race for lieutenant governor against Democrat Douglas Wilder, who had vulnerabilities, Mr. Chichester kept his punches up, losing with 48 percent of the vote. Yet forgiving anytime soon the orchestrated slurs of the current campaign would require that Mr. Chichester's name be preceded not by "Sen." but by "St." His supporters are roused for a warpath that stretches beyond Election Day.
The strategy of the Rothfeld forces is not new to anyone familiar with the smashface school of American politics. It involves combing the hundreds of votes cast by a veteran legislator, carefully selecting the most unflatteringly ones (or those that can be "spun" to seem so), and presenting these as the essence of the incumbent. Mike Rothfeld has placed the voting record of John Chichester in front of a funhouse mirror, pointed to the distortions in the glass, and called them reality. Not so.
Of course there are philosophical differences between Mr. Chichester and Mr. Rothfeld, and of course politics is often about sharpening such differences, and of course Mr. Rothfeld, a relative unknown, must carry a large whetstone to sharpen them. But to make the case that Mr. Chichester is agnostic on abortion you must disregard his 90 percent lifetime favorable voting rating by the Virginia Society for Human Life. To make the case that he is a promiscuous tax-and-spender, you must hide dozens of his votes to kill measures carrying a price tag for taxpayers, and you must not say that he has voted for precisely three tax increases in 25 years, including two miniscule hikes in the gas tax (1 cent, 2 cents) and one "horse trade" vote for legislation with no chance of passage.
To make the case that Mr. Chichester is an enemy of private educational alternatives, you must edit from your mailers his 1984 sponsorship of homeschooling academic safeguards without which the state may have tried to stop the practice. To claim that Mr. Chichester is a closet liberal, you must forget to say that he left the Democratic Party in 1969 because of its excessive liberalism.
Indeed, the demonization process requires copious memory lapses. The truth is, if the worst moments of the average life were made into a feature film, its owner would have to leave town in disguise. But Mr. Chichester, by any fair accounting, has had fewer of these moments than most people with a 25-year legislative record to potshot.
To say that all is fair in politics should not mean that all must be foul. The Rothfeld campaign's lowest blow (so far; there is still a week to go; the lads are creative) is to paint Mr. Chichester as a friend of "sodomy." A flier stuck last Sunday behind the windshield wipers of cars parked at area churches, styled as a candidate questionnaire, asks, "Do you support a ban on the teaching of sodomy to schoolchildren?" In the John Chichester column: "No." In the Mike Rothfeld column: "Yes." Mr. Chichester received no such "questionnaire," much less gave the answer purported. On the page opposite, Herbert Lux, who describes himself as Mr. Rothfeld's "director of grassroots activities," accuses Mr. Chichester of, in effect, introducing a curriculum of "oral or anal sex" to kids. Mr. Lux evidently believes that grass roots grow hardiest when fed sewage.
Sadly, the distortion of Mr. Chichester's public life is paced by another distortion--that of the judgment of a large chunk of the Rothfeld base, conservative Christians. In their ardor to reform the body politic, some of these citizens have fallen into what, if they would take a step back, they might recognize as heresy. In hot pursuit of some virtues, they have lightened their load by casting off others. To quote Psalm XXIV: "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall rise up in his holy place? Even he that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; and that hath notsworn to deceive his neighbor."
The conservative-Christian critique of society, as it happens, has much validity. Christian traditionalists were the first to lambaste a popular culture whose crud quotient is sufficiently high to alarm even the irreligious. The Christian Right, with its liking for sectarian and homeschooling, correctly recognizes the moral hazards that lurk in public schools where harmful peer pressure is barely checked by hamstrung adult authority. In their condemnation of nonmarital sex, orthodox believers were ahead of the social scientists, who have since documented the calamitous consequences (crime, poverty, etc.) of epidemic out-of-wedlock births. And even pro-choice Americans must sense that social mores have become more callous--regarding the treatment of women, for example--since the Age of Abortion removed meaningful protection from defenseless human beings on the wrong side of the birth canal.
But in their zeal to make a better society, conservative Christians can be tempted by expediency. As the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis wrote, "[W]ickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way."
Was Lewis ever right. The publisher of the after-church sodomy indictment is American Renewal, "the legislative action arm of Family Research Council." Thoughtful believers on a mission to convince a skeptical public of the truth of their positions are undercut when those acting under their flag spurn fair play and turn the cannons of ruthless rhetoric on decent public servants. Christian soldiers? These are Christian terrorists. Believers who link themselves with these ends-oriented wretches soil the causes they champion and the faith they profess.
Several area political leaders who accept the label "Christian conservative" are thoroughly honorable women and men. They should amend their policy regarding primary endorsements, break their silence, and join House of Delegates Speaker Bill Howell, R-Stafford, in disavowing the Rothfeld campaign's methods and urging Mr. Chichester's re-election. There may be a higher imperative to do this than secular politics.
However, every registered voter should cast a ballot in next Tuesday's election--and not just to retain the services of Mr. Chichester, the Senate Finance Committee chairman, though that is hugely important to this area. Equally important, the forces aligned with Mr. Rothfeld must be defeated, as the military says, "in detail." The way to accomplish that is with a massive turnout that renders an unspinnable verdict on the politics of defamation.
Of this disease, democracy is the surest cure. After "pushing all the right wing's hot buttons" to get its supporters to the polls, the "sole goal" of the Rothfeld campaign, says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, "is to produce a very low turnout. June is not when most Virginians are used to voting. But there is no election in November. This is the election."
A crushing Chichester win on June 10, in a primary open to voters of every party, would tell all the slick-jowled opinion-manipulators inside the Beltway that their direct-mail attacks and church-lot sleazesheets are--in a true community--a waste of suckers' money. "The Irish," groused Freud, "are the only people who don't benefit from psychoanalysis." Let the Fredericksburg area be likewise exceptional in resisting poisonous propaganda. Never let our streets become mean streets.
