Wednesday, May 17, 2006 | 7:30 a.m.
Gov. Mike O'Callaghan was a generational thinker.
I remember when Mike was visiting his friends, the Brookmans, in Las Vegas in 1974. It was during the Watergate hearings when the country was learning about plumbers, break-ins, wiretaps and practically every other kind of nefarious activity, and just what a sitting president and all of his men had to do with those activities.
It was a low point in our nation's political life and a bottoming out for the body politic. I remember Mike's words as if he said them yesterday - which, for a lot of reasons, I wish he had. He told me that within one generation it will become almost impossible to find good people who want to run for or hold elective office in this country as a result of what President Nixon did. He said that the public would demand to know so much more about the candidates, too much in fact, and that we would demand too much from the good ones who did offer themselves up for public service.
Well, here we are, one full generation later and Mike was absolutely right. The problem is that this thing could get a lot worse before it gets better, not because of what the politicians and elected leaders do or don't do, but because of what we, the people, refuse to do.
And it is becoming apparent at all levels of government. Take, for example, Sheriff Bill Young's decision not to run for re-election. By all accounts, he had the money, the popular backing and the support of enough voters to win his re-election effort going away. But, for some reason, he chose to step down after one term.
We can accept at face value his reasons for wanting to get out of public life. He is an honest man and there is no reason to disbelieve him. What is disheartening, though, is that the office of sheriff should be a plum job for anyone with law enforcement or legal training and, yet, Bill is walking away. Have we made it too difficult for good people to run for office and, once in, do the job we expect them to do?
I just came back from a series of think tank meetings in Washington, D.C., which were attended by some of the best and brightest people in and out of public office. If there was a theme in and around those meetings and the dinners that followed, it was that the quality of leadership being offered the American people - from the left, right and center - is woefully wanting and, worse, too timid to keep this great country on the course of greatness.
Pick the subject matter, the answers were the same. Officially and unofficially, on and off the record, the people of this country were not getting the benefit of the best and brightest our country has to offer. Even from the best and brightest! And while there was blame to go around, the refusal of the electorate to properly inform itself on the issues was the biggest culprit in this failure of the democratic system.
What I took from all that meshed perfectly with what Gov. O'Callaghan told me so many years ago. It is not the office seekers and officeholders' fault. It is our fault because we have demanded too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right things from those we expect to lead.
That makes the job almost impossible to do. Sheriff Young had no problem doing his job, but the personal cost of doing it apparently was just too much. To his credit, he has the strength to say no more when many in public office who have long since passed the point where their effectiveness has waned continue to stay on. The result is poor governance.
So who is really at fault? The easy answer is to blame the media for causing us to focus on the personal lives and warts of our elected leaders rather than the issues that matter and the policy considerations that would apply to an effective solution. But it is not the media's fault.
Newspapers and news programs merely report what is happening. And what passes for news these days? Entertainment talk shows that deal more with rantings and ratings than with rational and reasoned thought processes. Why? Because that's what the people seem to want. Give us an "America Idol" or a show about American heroes and we choose the idol every time. Give us something "fair and balanced" or something based more on what is real and responsible and we opt for the slogan more times than not.
The result is an electorate that is less knowledgeable, less informed, less involved and less caring than is necessary to make the kinds of complicated decisions about our country that this very complicated world demands. So we wind up electing people with slogans rather than people with ideas; people with slick advertising rather than people with determination and skill; people with the right populist tone rather than people who really care about the population; and people who care less about the voters than they do about themselves.
In short, we get what we either pay for or vote for. Either way, we get incapable people who provide insufficient governance. And that results in the people getting more frustrated, more disconnected and more irrational on the subject of representative democracy.
There are many dangers to a democracy. Two big ones are an uninformed electorate and an electorate that no longer has faith in its leaders to the extent that it will take matters into its own hands. Government by petition would be one result; government by luck - good or bad - would be the other.
I cannot begin to tell you the level of frustration I witnessed in Washington among elected leaders - Republicans and Democrats - Beltway insiders and outsiders - pro-business and pro-consumer - and those in whom this country normally places its trust who toil along the sidelines. And it all stems from the lack of civility, lack of competence and lack of trust that exists in that town. That same disease, or whatever we want to call it, has spread to the rest of the country and in some small way played a hand in Bill Young's decision.
I am not suggesting that if we all took the time and made the effort to inform ourselves about life around us that things would get better in a hurry. But, what I am saying is that when Mike O'Callaghan told me this would happen one generation hence, he was absolutely right.
So, it stands to reason that if we want to fix this mess we have gotten ourselves into, we ought to start right now. Because if we do, if we commit ourselves to paying attention to the facts - not the entertainment news - if we commit ourselves to paying attention to the public lives and not the private lives of those who offer themselves to public service, and if we commit ourselves to being the kind of citizens who want to help those we elect rather than to destroy them, then we have a chance of making this country and this democracy well again sometime during this next generation.
I am not sure we can wait another three decades because this world is becoming a vastly different and far more dangerous place than it was when it was the United States against the Soviet Union. In fact, I am certain that we had better start now if we want to do what is right for this democracy.
And we had better start by recognizing and taking responsibility for the person who is the biggest culprit in this downhill slide of our democratic way of life. It is, as the Constitution says, "We, the people."
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