The Art Of Politics

For too many of its advanced practitioners, the art of politics involves too much grand talk and not enough grand results. Unfortunately, the consequences of trying to slay modern dragons with a mere jawbone can be devastating and tragic for ordinary people who take all the words at face value. Think of all the sunny optimism that initially attended FEMA’s (“heckuva”) job in New Orleans late last year and the rollout of the Medicare drug prescription plan this month and compare that with the end result of those efforts.

It used to be that those suffering through the consequences of governmental overhype and underperformance would at least have the consolation of watching politicians eat their words. These days they don’t even do that. It is easier simply to ignore the unfortunate consequences of their actions and come up with some more grand talk. The closest we ever get to an apology is nonspecific and in the passive voice: Mistakes were made.

That was the tenor of the comments made by Connecticut’s Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz earlier this month in the wake of her embarrassing abandonment of a lengthy process that was supposed to provide the state with electronic voting machines for the 2006 election. The finalists in the bidding process, she noted, had misled the state about having the proper certifications required by state and federal guidelines and could not provide full-ballot displays on their machines, which she said is required by state statute. Her action came long after the state Registrars of Voters Association recommended last year that the bidding process be aborted and restarted to ensure better compliance with state and federal guidelines and to spare registrars and election officials around the state the impending chaos of a hasty and underfunded rollout of new and unfamiliar voting machines.

This week, we learned from Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal that state law holds no requirement for a full-ballot display as Ms Bysiewicz had been telling vendors interested in providing voting machines for the state. Evidently as they were misleading her, she was misleading them. The secretary of the state apparently neglected to check the statute she was citing. She explained it this way to the Associated Press this week: “We had, in our office, the precedence of interpreting the statues that were passed back in the 1930s and we had been asked over the past seven decades about it and our interpretation has always been the same.” Loose translation: Mistakes were made.

It is our sincere hope that whatever voting machines we end up with in 2006 and beyond will yield elected leaders for whom the art of politics is expressed in the medium of competence and not mere words.