On a gorgeous, crisp November day, under a cloudless sky, an angry electorate went to the polls to send a fresh intake of even more angry and divided politicians to Washington.
What a difference two years make. On Nov. 4, 2008, millions lined the streets, queues snaking around the block, in a display of electoral fervor driven by optimism summed up by US President Barack Obama’s mantra, “Yes we can!”
On Tuesday, there was again plenty of passion on display. Reports from around Kentucky suggest people were willing to queue for an hour to cast their vote. However, this time their passion was of a different sort, a cantankerous, peevish passion whipped up by millions of dollars spent on attack ads.
“This has been an angry election,” said retired engineer Bob Adams, having just voted at the Family Bible church, a simple white building tucked into rolling farmland on the outskirts of Bowling Green. “People are angry about the situation they are having to deal with. Life has changed significantly in the last couple of years for many of us.”
If the voters were fuming, the politicians they were electing were even angrier. The Kentucky Senate race between Rand Paul, an eye doctor who lives in Bowling Green, and his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway, was as pretty as a bout of real wrestling.
The two have been flinging millions of dollars of TV advertising, trying to besmirch the other. Paul is the son of Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas who has become a national figure for the Tea Party movement by dint of his hardline rightwing views.
Paul painted Conway as a lackey of the White House. In one commercial he called him “Obama’s yes man.” Conway fought back by getting down and dirty. In one advert he accused Paul of having kidnapped a woman as part of his fraternity at university whom he then made to bow down before a false idol. Paul riposted that his Christian faith was being assaulted.
Conway went on to air another controversial ad: edited clips of one of Paul’s supporters stomping on the head of a female political opponent at a rally. The assailant, Tim Profitt, has been charged with assault, though the Paul camp has said he has nothing to do with them.
Such a welter of attack ads, even by the standards of the US’ brutal politics, distressed many voters who called for a return to a more positive style of campaigning.
Lisa Meeks, a natural Democratic voter, said she had refused to vote as a protest.
“I hated all the negative ads from both sides,” she said.
Mark Watson, a Paul supporter who works in the health field, said: “There’s too much mudslinging.”
Kirk Tinsley, a computer technician who also voted for Paul, said: “I’m glad the election’s over. I get sick when I think of how much money they’ve spent attacking each other.”
While voters appear deeply turned off by the antagonistic tone of debate, that has not stopped them casting their votes on largely negative grounds themselves.
At the Family Bible church, most voters were backing Paul, and the reasons they gave leaned heavily on what they wanted to cut down and reduce, rather than what they wanted to build or create.
It was as if Obama’s “Yes we can!” had been rewritten, as the cry went up across the Kentucky countryside, “No we won’t!”
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