Last time I wrote about questions I wish political candidates would truthfully answer. Likely not gonna happen.
Truth is, the next best thing we voters will ever get from the winners will be the actual records of their recorded, public votes or non-votes on the motions and bills and resolutions before them — well after we voters are in the politician’s rearview mirror.
I mentioned last time that I’ve endorsed candidates in the past. Not all win, but of those who do, I wrote that I’ve been bitterly disappointed in several of them after they took office. I now routinely half-joke with candidates by asking them, “How long before you go over to the dark side, six weeks or six months?” Probably more like six minutes.
So what is “the dark side”? Simply defined, it’s the mindset that minimizes or discards an active, priority sense of personal, continuing responsibility to the taxpayers and the voters. It’s the opposite of dancing with the one that brung you.
It happens from top to bottom, from president to city council member. All of a sudden, the newly elected joins an exclusive club and begins to conform to the club’s unwritten code.
Whoever the candidate was before election victory, now that candidate becomes somebody “special.” Ordinary citizens increasingly cannot comprehend or appreciate that “specialness.” Once you are on the inside, you see things in a different light. Your former priorities begin to seem distant, quaint. Now you are part of the ruling class. You have higher responsibilities than to those pesky voters, those increasingly ignorant taxpayers.
You now have a group of people who defer to you, treat you with the respect you so deserve, who drop what they are doing to cater to your requests. Those people are government employees. They recognize your “specialness” and in turn you recognize that these people now deserve your reciprocal respect as well. It’s a mutual admiration society, especially if those cost of living raises come with regularity.
If citizens ever wonder why government never seems to stop growing in size and expense, look no farther than those last two paragraphs. Whatever party label the candidates wore before election victory, they now have been inducted as the newest gold card members of the Government Party.
It goes a long way toward explaining why — just to take a hypothetical case — a school system with declining enrollment hires ever more teachers and expends ever more money even when fewer and fewer kids require its basic services.
Herewith a rule of life: However it was born, a bureaucracy exists primarily to grow, to increase its size and scope. It will not ever naturally reduce itself. That has to come from outside, from somebody who actually believes that taxpayers deserve to keep as much of their own money as possible.
It is only rare elected officials who fail to succumb to that “specialness,” to that capture of their priorities, to the changing of their pre-election priority focus on the taxpayers to their post-election love affair with the insistent bureaucracies.
Who among this current crop of candidates on the local level will fall prey to the siren song of “specialness”? Which rare ones will resist and doggedly remember that taxpayers deserve their first allegiance?
I recognize some of the ones on the ballot who have already made the switch to the Government Party. Do you?
[Cal Beverly has been editor and publisher of The Citizen since its formation in 1993.]