The end of Maryland?s legislative session in early April marks the beginning of the state?s campaign season. This year, the quantity of campaign messages filling Maryland?s airways and mailboxes during that time has created some of the most expensive campaigns in Maryland history. As a result, many people have renewed calls to cap campaign spending.
But what about the need to cap the time spent by candidates, especially elected officials, on politicking?
About a month ago, the White House announced President Bush would campaign for Republican candidates in the Midwest that day. It seemed as though the president?s time and attention werefocused more on politics in our nation?s Midwest than such pressing issues as the war in the Mideast.
Around that time, the governor of Maryland was spending time away from his Annapolis office to campaign in Baltimore City, while Baltimore?s mayor sought votes for governor out of town.
And in the races for U.S. Senate, Congress, county executive and attorney general, we see numerous current office holders running furiously for their own or other offices.
With terrorism threatening, the health care system collapsing, drugs and crime rampant and schools in trouble, to name a few issues ? why should our elected officials spend so much time and energy campaigning?
Our democratic form of government calls for open elections and the right of every citizen to run for office.
But we as citizens also have the right to expect our taxpayer-funded elected officials to tend to official business.
Staff members of elected officials must use vacation or leave the public payroll to work on a campaign. But no such restrictions exist for elected office holders.
One solution to this problem would be to limit the length of campaigns. Shorter elections would help reduce some of the time pressure on candidates to raise money since compressed campaigns would require less funding.
Our current system forces people to devote huge chunks of time to fundraising.
Equally important, shorter campaigns would mean that those officials we have “hired” by our votes to do their jobs would be at work and not out on the campaign trail, far away from serving their constituents.
Shorter campaigns may also lessen the vitriolic attacks that surface over the course of a long election period. This may attract more qualified candidates, many of whom now shrink from enduring nasty marathon campaigns.
Winston Churchill, in his famous Iron Curtain speech delivered in 1946 in Fulton, Mo., said that “democracy is a terrible form of government, but all the other forms of government are so much worse.”
Certainly one drawback of democracy are our long, expensive elections. Already, the drumbeat has begun about the 2008 presidential race.
Congress should formally institute shorter time periods in which campaigning can be conducted to curtail the need for candidates to spend so much time as well as money to get elected.
We may find we will get a better democracy ? and better government ? as a result. It?s about time.
M. Hirsh Goldberg, a Baltimore-based public relations consultant and the author of five books, has been press secretary for a governor of Maryland and a mayor of Baltimore. He can be reached at [email protected].
