Race for House seat running off the road

It didn’t take long for the negative campaigning to begin in the race

to fill the U.S. House seat vacated by former Rep. Chris Cox.

Last week, a Washington, D.C.-based group, the Club for Growth,

aired TV and radio ads blasting former Republican Assemblywoman

Marilyn Brewer for missing votes during her years in Sacramento. The

group endorsed her main Republican rival, state Sen. John Campbell,

in August. The organization’s president, Pat Toomey explained the ad

by telling the Pilot, “I think Marilyn Brewer has made it pretty

clear she’s got some money, and she’s going to spend it. She’s going

to try to attract Democrats to support her candidacy, and we don’t

think that should be taken lightly.”

Before attacking Campbell and his supporters for not running a

clean, issues-based campaign, it is important to note Brewer’s

response. Her campaign also attacked Campbell’s failure to vote on

several issues and, even more, included this jab: Campbell and his

supporters “are sounding more like John Kerry every day.”

With a month left in the primary phase of the special election,

the former Democratic presidential candidate’s name is already being

bandied about. What can voters expect come Oct. 1?

What they can expect and what they deserve seem to be, yet again,

two divergent roads.

What voters can expect is more negative campaigning, more

name-calling, more feints toward the unimportant and away from

anything substantial.

What they can expect, judging from the first days of the campaign,

is more of the same.

What voters deserve is to learn about what separates the

candidates. What are the important differences between the two

leading Republican candidates, Brewer and Campbell? Does Minuteman

Project founder Jim Gilchrist have anything to offer beyond

anti-immigration talk? Do the Democrats, including party-backed Steve

Young, have issues that resonate with voters, who are mostly

Republican, in the district? (The Daily Pilot news staff will work to

deliver readers the answers to these questions.)

Don’t expect to get much from the candidates on these issues. It

is a sad fact of contemporary politics -- the voluminous details of

which don’t need to be rehashed here -- that attack ads and character

assassinations are the life and breath of political campaigns.

They’ve proven successful, in no small part to the legions of voters

who aren’t demanding that enough is enough.

Voters can expect to get “enough” in the coming weeks.