New Rules

Lightshines said...

My voice is a little hoarse this week so instead of singing a song, I thought I'd ask Bill Maher to help us out with some New Rules for this year's campaign:

New Rule: Stop telling us that you are “independent” when you’ve been nominated by a political party. They nominated you because they know you’ll do what they want, not because of your good looks (when Ellen Karcher and Jen Beck pass as “hot women”, you KNOW no one has been nominated for their good looks).

New Rule: Don’t insult our intelligence by telling us how you’re going to cut the budget just as soon as you get to Trenton. No one is going to listen to a freshman assemblyperson or even a sophomore one, so the answer is, you’re going to do what you’re told to do.

New Rule: Please don’t send us those campaign pictures this year with you and your family. If your family life was so good, you wouldn’t be taking all of this time away from them to run for office.

New Rule: Spare us the campaign biography that says you were president of the student body or campfire girls or whatever you did before you grew up. You didn’t work a 50 million or 100 million or 500 million dollar budget in the campfire girls or on campus so we don’t care.

New Rule: We don’t care whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life. You’re not running for Supreme Court or for president, so it doesn’t matter. It’s not an issue you’re ever going to affect.

New Rule: If you don’t have any experience, don’t pretend you do. When you tell us you were the “assistant to an attorney who advised someone who represented a person who helped get a friend elected president of the republican club” you’re telling us you have no experience to tell us about. Trust me, we already know that.

New Rule: Stop getting your friends to post online that your opponent is gay. We’re living in Monmouth County. All of the residents here have been screwed up the rear by local politicians for years. We’ll just assume your opponent lives here too.

New Rule: Stop trying to convince us that your opponent is controlled by “special interests.” You are running a campaign. Unless you paid for it yourself, you are controlled by whatever special interest is paying for your campaign, even if it’s your county chairman. If you did pay for the campaign yourself, you’re an idiot and we don’t want you representing us anyway.

New Rule: We don’t want to hear that you are against crime, opposed to domestic violence, or will fight for more services and lower taxes. A crime by definition is already a violation of law – there’s not much more you can add to that picture. Since we don’t expect you to say you are for domestic violence, you’re not telling us anything. You can’t add services and cut taxes at the same time; at best you can “rearrange services” and replace one tax with another one that’s not as visible.

New Rule: Finally, don’t knock on our door and say “I want to be your committeeperson/councilperson/assemblyperson/senator or whatever.” You don’t want to be MY representative. You want the title. You don’t care whether I come with the package or not. But that’s ok, after all these years of campaign promises and lies, I really don’t care who my committeeperson/councilperson/assemblyperson/senator or whatever is. But the campaign literature is a lot of fun.