Roll up, roll up to the US elections circus!
Sebastian Smith
October 28, 2010 - 9:59PM
Heard the one about the witch, the brothel madam and the guy in the Nazi suit? The punchline is that they're not jokes, but candidates in perhaps the zaniest US congressional elections ever.
Just when US politicians seemingly couldn't find new ways to lose their dignity, they did.
There are serious issues in Tuesday's congressional and gubernatorial polls: President Barack Obama's authority and the struggling US economy, for starters.
But that didn't always mean a serious campaign.
Take Christine O'Donnell, Republican senatorial candidate in the state of Delaware.
Her most famous declaration? "I'm not a witch."
O'Donnell, one of the angry, anti-Obama insurgents from the Tea Party movement, may have an important contribution to offer, but her passionate non-witch declaration -- even though she admitted to dabbling in the dark arts long ago -- is all many are likely to remember.
Then there's Carl Paladino, running as Republican candidate for governor of the massively indebted, politically dysfunctional New York state.
To project a tough, no-nonsense image, he famously vowed to take "a baseball bat" to the legislature in Albany.
Unfortunately, the righteous man turned out to have a dirty secret: his reported penchant for sending racist and X-rated email attachments, including one depicting a woman getting over-friendly with a horse.
Paladino's not alone with a porn problem. South Carolina's Alvin Greene, running for the Senate as a Democrat, actually faces pornography charges.
If they lose on Tuesday, both men might get sympathy -- or more -- from fellow would-be politician Kristin Davis.
She's running for New York governor, but her main political exposure has been as the madam who supplied Eliot Spitzer, the state's chief executive at the time, with prostitutes, leading to his resignation in 2008.
"Politicians are the biggest whores in this state. I might be the only person on this stage who knows how to deal with them," she proudly declared in a televised debate to explain why she was qualified for high office.
What with the economy and the military quagmire in Afghanistan, there's plenty of bad news in this election. So it might be no surprise that some candidates are lashing out at the messengers.
Paladino told an annoying reporter to his face: "I'll take you out, buddy," while Joe Miller, a Tea Partier from Alaska -- home state of Tea Party queen Sarah Palin -- went a step further: his private security guards actually handcuffed pesky Alaska Dispatch editor Tony Hopfinger.
But Republican congressional candidate Rich Iott has only his own judgment to blame for bad press.
It emerged during the campaign that he likes to dress up as a World War II German SS officer in battle reenactments. Of course, Iott says these sessions, where he reportedly participated under the nomme de guerre Reinhard Pferdmann, are all clean fun.
But the Internet pictures of him in Nazi garb have gone down badly, even in this angry, radicalized year.
Not that all the wackiness of this election is ugly. Some is just plain wacky: such as Jimmy McMillan, leader of The Rent is Too Damn High Party, running for New York governor.
An impressive figure who wore black gloves and sported an enormous handlebar moustache, McMillan said he wants to "make New York an independent state." First, though, those rents need lowering.
And then there is California's bid to become the first state in the country where smoking marijuana is legal.
The debt-ridden Golden State has other hot contests. There's a tight Senate race and the gubernatorial contest between record-spending Republican billionaire Meg Whitman and Democrat Jerry Brown, nicknamed "Governor Moonbeam" for his last spell in the office.
But after all the vitriol in these elections, the marijuana referendum, known as Proposition 19, could be the ultimate escape.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking- ... 20101028-175uu.html
