The election was just completed, and the winners and losers are spinning the results. One welcome outcome is that my home phone stopped ringing with unwanted political calls and so did my cellphone. These annoying calls were designed to convince me to vote for this or that, but in my case all it did was make me hit the “block” button and ignore the call.
Statewide, the party in power will remain so from now to eternity it seems; they will continue to wreak havoc on our communities with their endless mandates, misguided green energy goals, assaults on our pocketbooks, and crime-increasing initiatives.
Locally, politicians vying for various elected posts made promises of better things to come that seemed rather vague and were frequently subject to change. All claimed to have the “experience necessary to get the job done,” but in some cases their past record clearly demonstrated that the only thing they did was cause trouble for the professional staff.
Fortunately, Lompoc voters saw through the smoke screen, and it looks like Mayor Jenelle Osborne will continue to occupy the center seat at council meetings. Meanwhile, maybe her opponent, who is now a three-time loser in elective politics, will simply return to managing his families’ vacant commercial properties and cluttering up his “ranch.”
There were several propositions on the ballot, which happens in every midterm election. In some cases proponents claimed that sick people would die if their idea wasn’t approved. On the other hand, the opponents claimed the same thing! In this case, it’s best to see what group is supporting the “yes” and “no” sides and make your choice accordingly.
Sometimes the supporters of these propositions are unions, and they are only supporting them to increase membership and make whatever service is being considered more expensive. In the case of the dialysis clinics (Proposition 29), the unions’ claim was that a stronger support staff was needed at the clinics.
The implication was that patients weren’t receiving adequate care, but I checked with a large medical provider, and they said that the doctor prescribing the care visited the clinics when their patients were being treated to monitor their progress. So, the union claim simply wasn’t true. This proposition appears to have failed by a wide margin.
Then there was all that money that seemed to flow into the campaigns in the form of donations. A lot of the money for local elections came from faraway places, from people and groups who don’t even live in the area. More came from unions that usually anticipate favorable treatment (pay and benefit raises) if the candidates they support win.
In politics, money really is the “root of all evil.”
At least in Lompoc, the high-money candidate for mayor lost because the public recognized that his claims of past successes weren’t credible.
Nationally, one party claimed that if the other acquired a majority in Congress, democracy would end and seniors would starve. They didn’t make the same stale claims when they acquired power and raided your pocketbook and seniors’ retirement savings accounts by implementing poorly thought-out economic recovery policies and stopped producing enough heating oil and gasoline to move America’s commerce. And when your grocery bills nearly doubled, they told you to eat more hot dogs.
According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of a democracy is “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”
And despite their claims, a democratic election was held last week, another will be held in two years, and the daily grind goes on as policies are debated, new laws enacted, and hot air circulates in the halls of government.
Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc. Send a letter for publication to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 17-24, 2022.