THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609270208
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: ON THE STREET
SOURCE: Bill Reed
LENGTH: 61 lines
It's the silly season, the time of year when days get shorter, politicians get longer winded and folks become increasingly anxious to get elections behind them.
And who can blame them?
The air is filled with rhetoric about crime, family values, education, leadership, welfare, Medicaid, the elderly, the young, foreign policy, character, national defense and on and on.
Pomposity, self-righteousness and verbosity are raised to a fever pitch at every level - national, state and local. Never have so many said so little over such an extended period.
Infomercials, TV and radio ads, stump speeches and appearances before influential lobbying groups like the Grand Order of Old Grouches Who Want Things Like They Used To Be Before World War II occupy an awful lot of air time and newsprint.
Despite promises to refrain from ``negative campaigning,'' opposing candidates gleefully take every opportunity to stick it to each other and meticulously avoid talking about the ``issues,'' whatever they are.
The media is solemnly serious about trying to package campaign coverage in a new, yet ``meaningful'' way so as to awaken the interest of voters to these ``issues.''
Voters, meanwhile, are stubbornly resisting efforts to arouse their interest in election issues as defined by the media or even the candidates themselves.
Mostly, it seems, voters are interested in what they've always been interested in: their wallets and their jobs.
Mainly they're interested in whether or not those jobs will be there in the morning when they wake up. With good reason, too. In the past five or six years many of those jobs have been ``downsized'' out of existence or disappeared south of the border due to the actions of some of the politicians seeking their votes on Nov. 5.
Despite vows to avoid seizing on the results of never-ending public polling, or accentuating the negative, that's what folks hear and read most when they flick on their TV sets or open their morning papers.
Journalists congenitally are unable to resist writing or talking about a horse race or a juicy scandal.
Therefore you get daily polls and spicy tidbits about bimbos the President has known, or his closest advisers have known or how Hillary regularly converses with the late Eleanor Roosevelt.
Media pundits become as gaseous as politicians as they mount their high horses to extol the virtues or point out the warts of candidates seeking office.
Most frightening of all is the prospect of even more intense pre-election babble to come.
In October - which is only two days away - the volume gets cranked up to rock concert level and the din will become excruciating.
How will voters be able to determine who is telling the truth? Who is the better man or woman? Who will fulfill those campaign promises? How will they make any sense of the political cacophony?
American philosopher William James (1842-1910) may be of some help here.
``The art of being wise,'' he said, ``is the art of knowing what to overlook.'' by CNB