All Quiet on the Northwestern Front

I tell you, it's creepy.

Long-time readers know that I look at the ground game when it comes to elections - yard signs, door-to-doors, mailers, voters' guides. I don't track the push polls and the robocalls as much, and armed with with books on tape and a TV remote with a mute button, I can remain invulnerable to the inanities of both radio ads and TV (Though Dino Rossi always ends up looking like that insincere cousin at the reunion who's getting his life back together).

But here we are, a month out of the election, and things are dead quiet on that front. Seriously. Where are the attack mailers? Where are the bad photoshop jobs and clip art from the GOP public folder? Where's the hate, people?

And after the flurry of yard signs in the primary, the only new ones involve the Proposition 1 Transit initiative. The No ones are recycled from the LAST Proposition 1, while the Yes ones show a light rail and a bus coming out from a mountain. Very nice detail, but from the highway it looks like a big "X", which sort of defeats the "Yes" message. Don't these guys check this stuff out? But this is a bright point in an otherwise clutter we've seen for months.

Now I understand the lack of attention from one standpoint. On a national level, the McCain campaign has apparently abandoned Washington for more battleground states, like Indiana and North Carolina (how the HECK did NC become a battleground state?). And on a state level, the Rossi campaign is running hard elsewhere to "Not let Seattle steal THIS election" while hoping that enough metropolitans will be confused as to whether GOP is a new party to blunt the votes here.

But even on the local level, there is a lack of attention. Where are the inevitable sexual predator mailers? The fast-and-loose math involved in the 2304 tax increases that the incumbent voted for? The barely veiled racism when invoking the Indian Casinos? Have the parties realized that this sort of stuff can do more harm than good?

Or maybe they have defined the Panther Lake Neighborhood as not being cost efficient anymore. We've been getting denser of late (in number of people, not IQ), so the mailers may have moved off to more profitable terrain, where the populace can be easily startled and bolted.

Or maybe this blog has scared them off. That they realize that if they send me a bad mailer, they will get mocked. Maybe I'm on a very, very small political "do not call" list. Maybe they're afraid of me.

Maybe ... Naahh!

More later,