The most entertaining aspect of a top-of-the ballot campaign in Indiana is the arrival of East Coast political consultants trying to read the Hoosier mind. You can watch it now in real time on the Beau Bayh commercials.
They inflate teen-age traffic tickets to reckless endangerment and shove addled, has-been legislators forward as valid representation of the electoral mood.
The consultants no doubt sell this as political hardball, something they think Midwesterners are too dim to discern. Well, we discern well enough, and such a cynical assessment of the electorate is reason to reject the message.
An example is the 2012 gubernatorial race between John Gregg and Mike Pence, both authentic Hoosier voices with important and sincere differences on the issues. That wasn’t good enough for the consultants. They don’t do issues, they do character assassinations. That formula presumed Pence supporters to be boorish right-wing country bigots.
Someone dug up a copy of our first “Indiana Mandate,” published years earlier when Pence was president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. They couldn’t have actually read it, though, for instead of being the KKK handbook implied in their attack ads it was a collection of policy papers — a tad pedantic, some said, but perhaps radical to the ears of young leftists campaign workers coming out of the Washington Beltway.
The Pence campaign staff (which also had a few too many consultants) instead of just reading the book themselves took the charge seriously. An aide called us in a panic to see if we could provide a defense.
Indeed we could. There were clippings from Indiana newspapers, including an editorial from Pulliam’s Indianapolis Star lauding “Indiana Mandate” as a measured, thoughtful addition to the public-policy discussion. The kicker was a letter from Gregg himself thanking us for a copy and extending his compliments.
Regardless, the corporate media went along with the denigration, conforming as it did to their own low opinion of Hoosiers. We wrote Gannett asking for an apology but never heard back. The Pence campaign was too gun-shy to publically correct the record.
All said, we cannot imagine that any votes were changed for the tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees and negative ads. (Pence won by 75,000 votes and the Star’s weekday circulation is now down 142,000 readers.)
My ultimate concern, though, is that the discussion in our state is thought to be so shallow that the Washington consultants and the Bayh staff imagine such base politicking would work. It is time, sigh, to limp to the polls again and try to prove them wrong. — tcl
