Win and lose, lessons learned from elections

With more than 200,000 Coloradans looking for work, someone just spent more than $5.5 million on three job interviews.

That’s about what the major gubernatorial candidates ponied up for the 2010 election – in one race, in one state. Taken collectively, while about 30 million Americans remain jobless, billions and billions of dollars changed hands to fill a couple hundred positions, only a few of which were actually vacant.

Through the magic of dead-tree communications, although you are reading it three days after the election, this editorial will go to print about two hours before the polls close, so we can’t analyze the results. But we can make some informed observations of the process that has already reset for 2012.

• When the obituary for advertising-supported broadcast media is written, the Supreme Court decision that unleashed an unrelenting geyser of negativity on the viewing public will be listed as proximate cause of death. Stations may love the oodles of campaign cash, but traditional radio and television outlets are already losing their most desirable demographics to a growing number of alternatives  – and listeners and viewers are driven further away by the slime that starts airing earlier and earlier in each cycle. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission need to stem the tide of anonymous attacks before the next presidential race, or there will be no such thing as an engaged electorate for 2014.
• The process of placing amendments on the state ballot has to be burned to the ground and rebuilt. The current lax system has turned our Colorado Constitution into the plaything of small groups who want to protect their own income stream, impose their own philosophical views, send their own message to Washington, or see just how gullible state voters really are. If any of this year’s amendments got more votes than Dan Maes, the answer is encouraging for anyone in the business of sending e-mails on behalf of dying Nigerian widows.

Secretary of State Bernie Buescher has called for possible jail time for anyone who abuses the petition process. While the ungentlemanly Douglas Bruce has refused to acknowledge paternity of Amendments 60, 61 and Proposition 101 since their conception in early 2009, the issue may be settled conclusively once the votes are counted, but to what end?

Unless the system is reformed, we will be doomed to repeat this exercise every two years. And couldn’t all that money be spent on better things, like growing jobs?

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