Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 17, 1992 TAG: 9202170236
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`VOTE SMART'
A DEMOCRACY works best when its voters learn the issues and the candidates, think things over, and then make informed and rational choices.No such place may exist outside civics textbooks. Most campaigns in recent years seem to focus not on issues but on personalities. Straw men are set up and demolished; character is brutally attacked.
If there's no handy human target, the focus is on feel-good fuzziness as a replacement for logic and thought. The less the voters know, the better that suits many politicians: Charisma, slogans and sound bites are their preferred routes to winning elections.
No wonder America, the world's premier democracy, now has the world's lowest rate of voter participation. Issueless campaigns produce elected leaders who have no real programs, no commitments and maybe no ideas. Problems fester unattended, government's wheels spin.
We the electorate can blame only ourselves for being taken in. But we don't have to be suckered by glitz or satisfied by pap. With a little trouble, we can learn more about candidates and issues by reading newspapers, periodicals and books; studying position papers and other materials at such public places as libraries; and even meeting politicians at rallies and asking questions.
Another source of help is in the offing. A bipartisan group called the Center for National Independence in Politics has been quietly at work for two years on what it calls Project Vote Smart. CNIP's goal is to gather "the enormous body of useful factual information that exists on candidates and then [provide] each citizen with instant access to the information relevant to their own unique concerns."
This information is to be available as part of college courses, in source books for journalists, in a "voter's self-defense manual" with facts and figures on candidates, issues, campaign finances, voting records, etc. For the concerned voter-in-a-hurry, there is to be a telephone hot line to provide "the [political] information you want to know, when you want to know it, and on the candidate you want to know it about."
CNIP, which will refuse any corporate or political-action-committee contributions, is hardly the first good-government organization to stress the importance of light rather than heat on public issues.
But CNIP is unusual in the broad section of political opinion it represents - founders include Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George McGovern and Barry Goldwater - and in its effort to make data fully and easily available to as many voters as possible. When information is easily accessible, that leaves us few excuses.
Being informed is part of a citizen's responsibility. But campaigns will stick with what works until the pols perceive that a majority - or at least a significantly large swing group - of us voters prefer campaigns with substance; and that we will not be put off the trail by red herrings.
In 1811 the French polemicist Joseph de Maistre observed: "Every nation has the government it deserves." Let's all be more deserving.