Danehy

I haven’t been this bummed out about an upcoming election since 1994 when Newt Gingrich hatched his Contract on America and created a stampede of knuckleheads, ne’er-do-wells and nincompoops into the House of Representatives. The fact that America’s Rube Population bought into the nonsense was sadly predictable. The only good thing about the election of 1994 is that it indirectly helped re-elect Bill Clinton in 1996. He would go on to preside over a robust economy and a balanced budget.

(If the SAT consisted of one question—that being “Who was the last President to have a balanced budget?—not one Young Republican would ever be able to get into college. They’ve all been programmed to say Ronald Reagan, who was the absolute king of deficit spending.)

What saddens me the most is that some Democrats (who should certainly know better) have taken this fatalistic approach of “We’ll lose this year and then win big in 2016.” They’ve thrown in the towel on this year and are planning on the election of somebody named Clinton in two years, all the while holding onto unrealistic hopes that Hillary is going to be able to conjure up really long coattails.

I’m sorry, but that’s not a strategy; that’s a shrug and a dream.

Oddly enough, while rudderless Democrats in other parts of the country are preparing for an election-night massacre, here in Arizona, the party of Mo Udall should do rather well and might even do really well. That’s fairly amazing for a state that has gone out of its way to make the political version of Sportscenter’s “Not Top 10” on an almost weekly basis.

Even some nut-job Tea Party members are embarrassed by the crackpot nonsense generated by the Arizona Legislature. (It’s a milder version of al-Qaeda members telling ISIS to tone things down because they’re giving Islamist terrorists a bad name.)

According to most polls, Felecia Rotellini—who could have saved Arizona a whole lot of embarrassment had she beaten Tom Horne in 2010—should beat Mark Brnovich for Attorney General. I guarantee that there are people out there who won’t vote for the Republican simply because his name is spelled funny. The Republicans should take up a collection and buy that dude a vowel.

Terry Goddard should win whatever office he’s running for (as long as it’s not Governor) based solely on name recognition. He’s been around so long, a certain percentage of Arizonans probably think that he’s his own son.

David Garcia looks to be on his way to being elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, succeeding midnight blogger and all-around creep John Huppenthal.

That’s three of the top five jobs in Arizona. The Treasurer’s job will go to Republican Jeff DeWit, who is unopposed. That leaves the biggest, and most important, office, that of Governor. Although he trails in virtually every poll, Democrat Fred DuVal remains tantalizingly close to front-runner Doug Douche-y, whose campaign slogan is “I don’t care how much taxpayer money I have to spend on lawyers, my administration is going to continue the proud Republican tradition of dicking public-school teachers whenever and wherever possible.”

That’s really hard to fit on a placard.

Even the current sitting Governor, Jan Brewer, thinks it would be prudent to pay the schools the $300-plus million owed them by the law-breaking Legislature. (I think they should have to pony up the entire $1.6 billion and I’m guessing that the judge will agree with me.) But Douche-y, strutting about wearing his very best Hater Hat, says that he supports throwing more and more taxpayer money down a hole just to keep his right-wing, teacher-hater buddies happy.

There aren’t a whole lot of propositions on this year’s ballot, but I’m giving serious consideration to getting one on the 2016 ballot. It would read very simply, “Any state legislator or elected official who knowingly and willingly uses his/her public position to act in opposition to the dictates of the State Constitution, or acts in any way to subvert or circumvent said Constitution, shall face a jail term.”

Yeah, pass that and see how long those phlegm-wads continue to flout the law. I’d love to see whether Senator Andy Biggs would continue giving public-school teachers the middle finger if he had to do so from inside Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s tent jail.

Douche-y is full of lots of other really, really stupid ideas, including his plan to fund Arizona’s schools by getting rid of taxes. There’s a reason why nobody has ever thought of that before.

One election that I’ll be glad to see getting over is that for the U.S. House of Representatives in District 2 (my district). The other night, my wife was watching “NCIS: McSally,” so named because the candidate was on screen more time than Mark Harmon. The amount of money being spent on this race is absolutely vulgar.

All I’ve learned so far from the onslaught is that Democrat Ron Barber once cast a vote to make the leader of House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, the leader of House Democrats … which she already was. Meanwhile, Martha McSally refuses to back away from the Crackpot Scheme Du Jour from 2012, suggesting the privatization of Social Security.

She must have been out flying a plane when former President George W. Bush suggested the same stupid-ass idea back in 2007.

This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2014.