For the first time in a generation, a competitive congressional race is brewing in my Ventura County, CA district. This series explores the local, statewide and national implications of a campaign that was born of voter discontent and might just wind up transforming Congress, and our politics in general. I outlined the parameters of the race here; a few weeks ago I interviewed the independent candidate, Linda Parks, who is starting to gain national attention for her quixotic quest; and last week I covered the single debate that will feature all six candidates in advance of the June 5 primary, exploring the ways in which such events bring out the best and worst in our politicians, and in our politics in general.

Like a lot of Americans, I never know what to do with political mailers. They’re printed in color on glossy paper, and cut in unusual sizes and shapes designed to make sure we pay attention to them. Occasionally they feature pleasant images of a candidate with her family, or with constituents who symbolize the campaign’s priorities (teachers, firefighters, veterans, nurses, minorities, generalized white people, etc.), and they feature upbeat messages like “Family First” or “Championing Education.” More often, though, they feature menacing or cartoonish images of an opponent, along with phrases intended to sow doubt or disgust – “Not Who She Says She Is,” or “We Just Can’t Trust Her.” Many times, it’s difficult to tell exactly who has sent a particular mailer – it’s amazing how tiny the print can get on a return address or a disclaimer. Always, these mailers are sent in hopes of changing somebody’s mind – if not in my household, then somewhere on my street or in my ZIP code.

Every time, though, I find myself asking the same question many Americans ask when such a mailer appears in the post: Does it belong in the wastebasket, or the recycling bin?

Campaign mailers have become a daily fact of life for registered Democrats in California’s brand-new 26^th congressional district … my district in Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles. Republicans are enjoying a mild spring here, with seasonal temperatures and a low volume of postal deliveries – primarily because there’s only one of them running for our open seat, a down-the-line conservative named Tony Strickland, and he’s expected to sail through the June 5 primary and into the general election. Democrats, on the other hand, are in a tizzy at the moment. Four of them are on the primary ballot, but the greatest concern for the party establishment is not that the wrong one might win a chance to oppose Strickland come November. It’s that none of them might get that opportunity.

The reason for that is California’s new open-primary system, which awards slots on the general-election ballot to the top two finishers in the primary, regardless of party. There is no guaranteed “Democratic” or “Republican” slot in November – and to complicate matters further, as I’ve noted throughout this series, the primary race in the 26^th features an independent candidate, county supervisor Linda Parks, who has an excellent chance of surpassing all the Democratic candidates next month and taking that second slot. Last week she even received a high-profile endorsement from the Los Angeles Times, an event that reportedly sent the Democratic establishment reeling.

If Parks reaches the general, the national Democratic Party’s chances of retaking the House in November will take a serious dip. The party’s electoral advantages in California are at a peak this year, thanks to a nonpartisan redistricting that eliminated a number of safe GOP seats – including this one, which now leans Democratic for the first time in, well, forever – and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is counting on the state to spearhead its nationwide effort to close the gap on the Republicans’ 25-seat advantage in the House. Electoral margins this fall are expected to be razor-thin at every level of government, so unless the 26^th district turns from “Red to Blue,” as the DCCC’s nationwide campaign calls itself, Congress probably won’t, either.

This confluence of circumstances explains why attack ads (and paper cuts) have mounted to absurd levels across the county over the last three weeks. (Two of them appeared in my mailbox on Tuesday alone.) Most of these hatchet jobs are the product of more than $800,000 in outside expenditures by Democratic-affiliated groups, according to columnist Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star. They’re coming from the DCCC (more than $150,000 to date), the House Majority PAC (about $417,000), the League of Conservation Voters (about $100,000), and a committee called Women Vote! (about $25,000), as well as from the well-heeled campaign of the leading Democratic candidate, Julia Brownley.

That total – for a primary! – is not just a record for our little pocket of suburbia, which sent the same congressman to Washington for a quarter-century. It also places the district among the 10 nationwide with the highest PAC and party spending so far in 2012. And the vast majority of that money is being spent with a single goal – to convince the county’s Democrats and left-leaning independents to reject Parks and pull the lever for somebody, anybody, with a “D” beside her or his name on June 5.

Their strategy centers on one key fact about Parks: Before she changed her voter registration to “No Party Preference” this February, she was a registered Republican, and had been since she first ran for office in 1994. That fact – and the year that she changed her registration, the year of the Contract With America – has allowed national and local Democrats to link Parks to every Republican villain of the last two decades, from Newt Gingrich to George Bush and Dick Cheney to Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. The most effective of these mailers arrived on Tuesday, referring to Parks’ candidacy as “the elephant in the room” (get it?) and reprinting her voter registration card from 1996, with its checkmark next to the word “Republican.” (Never mind that another part of that form notes that Parks previously was registered as a Democrat – she changed her party ID in order to boost her chances of winning election in the conservative city of Thousand Oaks.)

That was a clever strategy on Parks’ part back then, but the Democrats are using it as a bludgeon against her now. All these ads play to a concern that I stated in my earlier column about Parks, which is that in our current hyper-partisan environment, a Democratic voter must worry that a self-identified independent candidate who’s not explicitly with the party will (at least occasionally) act against it, even if she claims to be neutral and nonpartisan. In the zero-sum political game Washington has been playing the last few years, isn’t an independent as much an enemy as a member of the other party?

So, yes, there’s a clever and even vaguely truthful strategy behind the $800,000-plus in Democratic attack mailers. But the devil, as always, is in the details – and the problems with the Dems’ strategy begin with the fact that while Parks used to self-identify as a Republican, she rarely has acted like one. Her elected positions, on the Thousand Oaks city council and the county board of supervisors, have been nonpartisan ones – and her most prominent achievements while in office have focused on the sorts of environmental and land-use issues that are dear to liberal hearts and anathema to the pro-development types who embody conservatism at the local level. Parks has long served as a bête noire for those folks … and she returned their enmity by endorsing the Democrat in the most recent local election for the state senate, a race in which the successful Republican candidate was – wait for it – her current GOP opponent, Tony Strickland.

To put it mildly, local Republicans loathe Parks, and she has very little in common with the standard-issue conservative bogeymen – two facts well known to any Ventura County voter who has been paying the slightest attention to local politics over the last decade. But the Democratic Party and PACs’ mailers aren’t targeted to those who pay attention. They’re targeted to low-information voters who tune in only for competitive races at the federal level, and who generally have slept through the GOP’s dominance of local politics over the last decades. It is with those voters – who also tend to be the most likely to consider a moderate independent candidate with high name recognition – that the Dems have the best chance of tarnishing Parks’ reputation and driving down her numbers in the primary.

The broad brush being used to accomplish that tarnishing is Parks’ supposed support for the House GOP agenda, and for the Tea Party. The operative implication is that if Parks was ever a registered Republican, she must wholeheartedly endorse the party’s current policies. “While Washington Republicans are driving Medicare into the ground, Linda Parks is riding shotgun,” says one mailer that places Parks in a convertible with Bush, Cheney and Palin – with Limbaugh at the wheel. “A vote for Linda Parks and the national Republicans is a vote for the Tea Party,” says another. (Conversely, an ad from House Majority PAC, this one aimed at independents, accuses “Politician Linda Parks” (horrors!) of profligate, “Washington-style spending” – and, more important, of elitism – for supporting an equestrian center in a county that includes a whole lot of horse country.)

Parks is on the record, repeatedly, as opposing any major revamping of Medicare and as supporting women’s reproductive rights without exception, so the substance of the Democrats’ attacks is disingenuous at best. But it’s pretty much the only chance they’ve got to deflate her local popularity and boost Brownley, a state assemblywoman from Santa Monica who faces charges of carpetbagging because she established residency inside the district just in time to launch her candidacy. Brownley has received the endorsements of most traditionally Democratic special-interest groups, from teachers to environmentalists to Planned Parenthood – yet pro-Brownley advertising is just a minor undertaking to date, compared to the avalanche of attacks on Parks.

Such a ratio of negative to positive ads might be smart strategy in a normal campaign – but national Democrats must have heard by now that Parks has a history of turning such high-expenditure attacks to her own advantage. Two years ago she did just that while defending her (nonpartisan) Board of Supervisors seat against a well-financed, nasty, and highly partisan challenge from Tony Strickland’s wife and political shadow, Audra. That campaign pummeled Parks from the right, but with language remarkably similar to that currently being used to pound her from the left.

Parks, in response, chastised Audra for waging a partisan campaign, cast herself as a martyr in the face of a tidal wave of GOP party and PAC money – and won re-election in a 21-point landslide. She has assumed the same posture this spring, holding up copies of the attack mailers during every debate and public appearance while asking her supporters to make history by rejecting the influence of special-interest money, and there’s no reason to think it won’t work for her again next month. Even if a significant number of individual voters reject Parks because of these ads, Brownley’s association with these distasteful mailers (and with the outside groups that will spend nearly $1 million on them by early June) may well wind up backfiring, and costing her at least as many votes as Parks stands to lose. For example, I’m not entirely sure for whom I’ll be voting on June 5, but I know it won’t be for Brownley.

And what if these attacks on Brownley’s behalf do wind up sinking her own candidacy, rather than Parks’? Here is another sense in which the Democrats’ strategy seems less than completely sound, for if Parks achieves top-two status on June 5 and goes on to face Strickland in November, the party’s options for influencing (or benefiting from) the general election seem rather more bleak than if they had laid off. It would seem that county Democrats’ natural inclination will be to support Parks over Strickland; he will mount the same sort of deep-pocketed, slash-and-burn campaign against her that the Dems are waging now, and if he wins election he’ll indubitably march in lockstep with John Boehner, Paul Ryan et al. Yet the Dems’ current blitzkrieg is no doubt poisoning the well among liberal partisans, many of whom may refuse to pull a lever for Parks in November even if the alternative is much, much worse. And nationally, the deep-pocketed DCCC and liberal-leaning PACs likely will be forced to sit out a general-election race that, even if there’s no Democrat on the ballot, might still prove decisive in determining whether Republicans keep their House majority.

And if Parks manages to win in November, how long will she remember the wrongs being inflicted upon her right now by the Democratic establishment? She told me last month that, should she decide she needs to caucus with one party or the other on Capitol Hill, she’ll base her decision on which party seems more intent upon working across the aisle and dealing honestly with the opposition. It’s hard to imagine that the Democrats’ current behavior will reflect well on them if she finds herself in a position to make such a call.

Still, the die has been cast, at least through June 5. In the meantime, Parks has been surprised with a bit of (unsolicited) outside spending on her own behalf. A group called icPurple, founded by Gateway, Inc.  co-founder Ted Waitt and dedicated to promoting independent candidates, has created a 30-second web ad touting Parks that may yet receive television airplay as well. Its message is simple, effective, and more than a bit naive.

Sure, mixing red and blue into purple is a nice concept – in the fantasyland of bipartisan compromise, it would happen every day. But in a real world (or, at least, a real congressional district) in which the blue team is walloping the purple with a deluge of paintballs, it’s becoming difficult to see how the spirit of bipartisanship will avoid fading once again to black.

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For the first time in a generation, a competitive congressional race is percolating in my Ventura County, CA district. This series explores the local, statewide and national implications of a campaign that was born of voter discontent and might just wind up transforming Congress, and our politics in general. I outlined the parameters of the race here, and a couple weeks ago I interviewed the independent candidate, Linda Parks, who is starting to gain national attention for her quixotic quest.

An overflow audience crowded every inch of sitting and standing room at a local conference hall last Monday night, craning their necks and getting their partisan hackles raised even before the 26th congressional district’s six candidates had entered the room. The scene was a debate – the first and perhaps only one to feature all of those six competitors on the same stage in advance of the June 5 open primary, which will send the top two vote-getters to the general election regardless of party affiliation. Expectations were sky-high amongst the onlookers for a partisan slugfest with a twist … that twist being the presence of a well-known independent candidate who has based her candidacy on pointing out every instance of her rivals’ partisan slugging.

Events pretty much played out as advertised – a steady diet of ideological back-and-forth, simmered with accusations of malfeasance and lack of qualification – and spiced with disrespectful rejoinders from the conservatives in the audience, who at times threatened to turn the proceedings into a 2009-style “town hall” debacle. The one Republican on the stage, state senator Tony Strickland, behaved like the confident and well-funded frontrunner he is, while the leading Democrat in the race, state assemblywoman Julia Brownley, spent the evening firing off round after caustic round at the liberal bull’s-eye of 2012, the Paul Ryan budget. The independent, Linda Parks, turned every answer into a critique of the two-party system and the disquieting influence of special interests on both Strickland and Brownley’s campaigns. Left sucking for oxygen were two lesser Democratic candidates whose presence can only be described as vanity affairs, while a Hispanic harbor commissioner named Jess Herrera spent the debate struggling valiantly to raise his profile above potential-spoiler status.

It was an unusually fiery debate, for these parts – one befitting the national focus that has been placed on this race by the major parties and their PAC cohorts, which are threatening to break previous records for spending by outside entities in a primary for a House seat. But while it accomplished much by allowing the principal candidates to mark their respective partisan (or non-partisan) territories, it didn’t offer voters much reason to like any of them. Strickland, Brownley and Parks walked into that room as ideological archetypes rather than captivating personalities; sadly, while all of them stuck the landings on their talking points, not one of them emerged looking any more attractive as individuals.

Sixteen years ago a documentary film titled A Perfect Candidate offered a sobering look at the malaise that has swamped contemporary politics – as embodied by the squalid and uninspiring “leaders” who are driven to compete for money and votes, as well as the uninformed and belligerent voters who elect or reject them. The film was a blow-by-blow account of the 1994 U.S. Senate race in Virginia, which featured two candidates who had entered the race with considerable (if questionably earned) star power: the incumbent, the LBJ in-law and former governor Chuck Robb, and the challenger, the Iran-Contra hero/criminal Oliver North. That election year featured a GOP electorate practically as exuberant in their irrationality as the Tea Partiers of 2010 — and Ollie’s turn as the uniformed, loyal-to-a-fault (and I do mean fault) Reaganite sent conservative activists and funders screaming to the barricades in an effort to get him into the Senate. But the resulting campaign was ugly and desultory, and disillusioning for both sides. The documentary portrayed two out-of-their-depth candidates who were clueless about how to translate expectations into ideas, or how to mobilize their bases for positive action rather than merely to fear and loathe the other side.

Unfortunately, a similar dynamic threatens to take hold here in CA-26 this year, because none of the top contenders seems to boast the combination of charisma and inspirational messaging that will send voters streaming to the polls to vote for something, rather than against something else. There is no lefty heroine like Elizabeth Warren in this race, no macho man like Arnold Schwarzenegger to fire conservatives’ loins – not even a Jesse Ventura to mix a spoonful of populist sugar into the medicine of anti-partisan moderation. That dynamic may change after June 5, depending on who’s left standing and how much money is poured into negative advertising. But for now, the three-week race to the primary seems a contest to see which candidate voters will find least compelling at the finish line.

Strickland, for example, is the type of frat-boy conservative – cool and confident in his demeanor, doctrinaire in his ideology, and situational in his ethics when it comes to attracting corporate donors and doling out the quid pro quo – that soothes what’s left of the GOP base while enraging liberals (who call him “Phony Tony”) and lulling moderates to sleep. The message behind every word he spoke so pleasantly and almost robotically during the debate, is: I am a Republican. If you’re a Republican, I believe what you believe, but let’s not talk about it right now. It’s all the message he needs, for the moment, since he’s all but guaranteed a top-two finish in the primary and a smooth transition toward the general election. He’ll get there with his ideas unchallenged and his moneybags bursting with special-interest cash.

Brownley, on the other hand, came into the debate with a more complicated mission. A highly regarded state assemblywoman from Santa Monica who recently moved into Ventura County to establish a semblance of local bona fides, she spent a bit of her debate time kicking playfully at the three fellow Democrats nipping at her heels – but mostly she focused on arguing that she, and not the moderate Parks, has the best chance of vanquishing the dreaded Strickland in November. She did so by taking the most pugnacious stance among the candidates, at times railing against the Ryan budget and GOP policies on immigration and women’s issues with a vitriol that must work nicely in front of highly partisan audiences at rallies and fundraisers. Unfortunately for her, this audience was tilted rightward by the presence of several dozen Strickland volunteers – who felt no compunction about yelling “Liar!” and “Nonsense!” when Brownley hyperbolized GOP positions on contraception (no, they don’t really want to take away women’s right to use it) and Social Security (in fact, it’s the one area on which the Ryan budget mostly wimps out).

Interestingly, though, it wasn’t only the ruder members of the audience who called Brownley on her more grandiosely partisan moments. It was Parks, who – for all her flaws as a candidate, which will be discussed in a moment – is serving as the conscience of this race. In the presence of an independent, PAC-money-free candidate with a real shot at winning, Brownley’s over-the-top attacks on Republican policies made her seem smaller, not larger. Strickland, to his credit, recognized this – and even joined Parks in condemning the falsehoods in a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee mailer that had been sent the previous week. Every other candidate on the stage joined him in that criticism, save one – Brownley. She couldn’t, as it turns out, because she had another hit job on Parks at the printer under her own name, which arrived in my mailbox late last week.

Brownley did manage one effective moment — her closing statement, when she turned the tables on Parks’ pox-on-both-your-houses stance. “This is not about partisan bickering,” Brownley said. “This is about two very different visions and sets of values for our country. I am not going to run away from my party’s principles. I’m proud to be a Democrat!” Unfortunately, a Democrat is all Brownley seems to be at this point – like Strickland on the other side, she seems a walking, talking embodiment of major-party talking points, with little to recommend her apart from her guarantee to vote a particular way on every issue that arises.

For her own part, Parks’ debate performance reinforced the odd cocktail of schoolmarmishness and blow-up-the-system anarchy that characterized our interview a couple weeks ago. She has a healthy, if perhaps elevated, understanding of what a victory would mean — both for herself, as a Capitol Hill embodiment of Kevin Costner in that awful movie Swing Vote, and for our district, which she frequently urges to “make history” by pulling the lever for her. Unfortunately, as it is with Strickland and Brownley, Parks as a candidate so far works better in theory than in practice.

When an independent – even one like Parks, who has won every (nonpartisan) election she’s ever entered — launches a campaign without a natural ideological constituency, it behooves her to ladle out a hefty dollop of the common touch. A person in her position really needs to be able to ask voters, “Don’t you wish there were more people like me in Congress?” and get an enthusiastic response in the affirmative. But Parks is humorless, and something of a scold, as she delivers her critiques of Washington partisanship and corruption. “I’m not taking any special-interest or PAC money,” she says at least six times an hour – but even when the next line out of her mouth is about doing the people’s work, the next line people take away seems to be, “… and doesn’t that make me better than everybody else, nyah nyah nyah.” Walking back toward my car, I must have heard at least three people say some version of, “I just don’t like that Linda Parks.”

Personally, I don’t know if I’d go that far – after all,  I do admire what Parks is trying to accomplish, and I have plenty of friends who are rather humorless (you probably don’t know who you are). But her above-it-all attitude (complete with occasional, Al Gore-style eye rolls) several times had me looking at the three “minor” candidates in the debate and wishing one of them would say, “Yeah, well, Linda, I’m not taking any special-interest or PAC money, either – mostly because nobody’s offering it to me.”

As onlookers frequently wind up doing at these crowded-stage debates, I found my mind wandering from the frontrunners and looking to those “minor” candidates for inspiration. I discovered it in Jess Herrera. Unlike Brownley, who is a modern, keep-the-coalition-together Democrat who feels compelled to hit every liberal touchstone while trolling for female/ethnic/gay/older/younger/tree-hugging votes, Herrera is an old-school, New Deal Democrat. He found his calling among his fellow military grunts as a young man, and on the docks among his fellow longshoremen in the years that followed. Eventually he came to represent them on the Oxnard Harbor Commission – and he spent much of his debate time introducing voters to his background and offering concrete examples of the ways in which he has brought individuals, industry and government together to solve actual problems in a way that benefited each party.

His story was refreshing, his rhetoric honest and inspiring … his defense of his qualifications a withering rejection of the received wisdom about what type of person should go to Congress … and yet, of course, he has no chance of getting past the primary to the general election. He is, at best, a niche candidate – likely to appeal to Hispanics in the western part of the county, but to few others who make up the contemporary Democratic coalition. His best chance to keep his name in the news past June 6 is if he siphons off enough of the Hispanic vote to boost Parks past Brownley into the general election – and if that happens, as far as local and national Democrats are concerned, his name in the news will be “Mud.”

Brownley’s best chance of avoiding that fate is to barrage potential Parks supporters with negative information about her – an ugly task that she and the national Democratic Party have embraced whole- (if cold-) heartedly, resulting in a deluge of attack mailers that have been stacking up on my desk for the last two weeks. The next column in this series will discuss those mailers, the strategies and risks behind them, and the astonishing – and perhaps unprecedented, at least during a primary campaign — antagonism that has developed between Democrats and an independent who, when push comes to shove, shares most of their views.

For now, though, the race continues forward from the benchmark moment of last week’s debate. It’s certainly a race to watch – more than $1 million of national PAC money already attests to that – but I wish it was a race to love watching. It speaks volumes about the state of our politics that, in our county’s first-in-a-generation competitive congressional campaign, those few of us who are paying close attention have already felt our enthusiasm meters plummeting toward zero.

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President Obama has just made some history that’s perhaps as significant as the legislation that emerged from his first two years in office … perhaps more significant, really. For the first time in history, a president of the United States has stated, publicly and unequivocally, his support for the fullest possible extent of gay rights. No matter how he got here — the years of fumbling around on the issue, the pressure created by Vice President Biden over the weekend as well as North Carolina’s despicable move yesterday, the odd timing of the statement in advance of what promises to be the most lucrative fundraiser in history at George Clooney’s house this week — there’s no denying that it took a whole lot of courage for Obama to make this statement, on television, during an election year.

And now we’ll see how both the left and right choose to push the electorate’s buttons on this issue. Will the Romney campaign allow itself (or be forced) to pull off its economic message in order to engage on a social issue that doesn’t cut clearly in any particular direction? How will the Obama campaign balance its desire to re-ignite the political passions of younger (and more-evolved, as this issue is concerned) voters with its need to hold ground with independents in swing states with anti-gay marriage amendments in their constitutions, such as Virginia, Ohio, and now North Carolina? And — let’s face it, this is the most entertaining question — how ugly will this debate get over the next six months, and will conservatives go over the edge here the way they have on immigration and women’s reproductive rights over the last six months?

Of course, Obama’s statement today doesn’t erase bigotry from 32 state constitutions; it won’t necessarily influence the court cases that are proceeding (too slowly) toward resolution; it won’t even change administration policy, which already has jettisoned support for the Defense of Marriage Act and has (again, too slowly) pushed forward on increasing partnership and spousal rights for gay couples in government. What’s most likely, at least over the next six months, is that public opinion on gay marriage (most recent Gallup polling: 50% approve, 48% disapprove, with independents leaning 57-40 in favor) will stratify along party lines the same way every other issue already has, from Medicare to climate change. Republicans will calcify in their vociferous opposition to gay rights, as long as Obama supports them; Democrats will attempt to use the issue to mobilize progressive voters who have been disheartened, or lulled to sleep, by the partisan warfare and snail-like progress of the last three years.  The big question is, who will be more motivated to go to the polls by this announcement — those who want to move forward, or backward?

It wouldn’t be surprising for election-day polling on the issue to mirror the presidential vote almost precisely. It’s next year, and the years after that, when Obama’s (long-time-coming) courage will make a real and lasting impact on Americans’ view of marriage rights. Everybody — and I mean everybody, left, right and center — knows that marriage equality is coming. There’s no stopping it, merely delaying it through efforts like North Carolina’s. Placing gay marriage, or civil rights in general, on the ballot is profoundly wrong for all sorts of reasons; to do so during a low-interest, low-information election when the only the opponents of those rights are driven to the polls for other reasons (like, say, a nominating contest) is a chump move, pure and simple. (See Newark mayor Cory Booker’s recent statement on allowing the public to vote on minority rights for a lesson in on-the-spot erudition.) North Carolina will pay for that move the same way Arizona is paying for its stupidity on immigration and Planned Parenthood, and the same way Florida is beginning to pay for its insane gun laws, through lower tourism and convention income. And someday very soon, the North Carolinians who voted for that amendment are going to feel foolish and ashamed of themselves.

I have written extensively about gay marriage before, here and here and here and here and elsewhere. Here’s the gist of what I’ve argued before: The basic question surrounding gay marriage is a constitutional one: Will the religious beliefs of one segment of our society – no matter how large or small – be allowed to dictate the laws of a diverse nation? Based on the First Amendment, the simple answer is “no” … but when it comes to politics and religion, things are never that simple. So here’s the longer answer:

The founding fathers, despite their acceptance of 18th-century societal “norms” regarding slavery and the rights of women, set up America’s civil society with the ideal of recognizing each individual’s rights equally. As the centuries have passed, our nation and its laws have advanced inexorably closer and closer to that ideal. As it pertains to gay marriage, however, our basic problem is the fact that our modern definition of marriage is really a two-part equation.

It’s a religious tradition – a practically universal one among faiths worldwide – that conforms to formal strictures beginning with a “sacrament” and continuing with a variety of moral boundaries (no adultery, “til death do us part” and all that). Of course, the sacrament of marriage long ago stopped depending exclusively upon religion for legitimacy; any Vegas wedding-chapel Elvis can tell you that.

However, marriage is at the same time a state-sanctioned (indeed, state-licensed) union that entitles those who enter into it to more than 1,000 federally recognized benefits, in addition to those offered by banks, insurers, and other private and public institutions. And currently, in 44 states at least, marriage is a right that is granted to people of one sexual orientation but not to the other, thereby excluding gays from all those benefits.

From a civil-libertarian standpoint, this situation is untenable. The state simply cannot bestow rights upon one group of citizens that it does not give to all. It’s discrimination, pure and simple, and contradicts the values of liberty and prosperity upon which the nation was founded.

So what we have here is the very definition of a church-state contradiction. Churches cannot and should not be forced to bless or recognize the marriage of anyone they choose to exclude; they’re not public institutions with legal obligations (as long as we ignore that pesky matter of tax exemptions and the responsibilities they confer), and they’re entitled to exclude anyone they want. If members of a particular church can live with their beliefs and practices, then so be it.

However, the federal government cannot be exclusionary in the same way, even if it is acting on behalf of millions of citizens who hold such beliefs. The principles of equality and freedom are right there in the Constitution, and as we move closer to a “more perfect union,” the laws and policies that institutionalize old prejudices must inevitably fall away. If they don’t, we’ll eventually reach a point at which our “American experiment” has reached its logical conclusion, and we’ll remember it as a near-miss in mankind’s attempt to achieve equality for all.

So, then, what’s the solution to the church-state conundrum? Must the state, in the name of equality, give up the power to license and recognize “marriages,” settling instead for recognizing “unions” for both gays and straights? If we do that, then is “marriage” a status reserved for church members, thus excluding from the institution not only the fraction of the population that is gay, but also the growing percentage of married couples (like my wife and myself) who were not married in a church and/or are generally “unchurched”? And what, in that circumstance, would define a “church”? Would Elvis wedding chapels qualify?

I don’t think any of that is necessary. It is entirely appropriate for the state to define marriage broadly, while various religious faiths define it however narrowly they want; after all, the Catholic church (for one) already forbids some things that the government not only supports, but funds (family planning, for instance, at least for the moment). As for individual beliefs … well, there’s no law against bigotry, and there can’t be. So, must all those who stand against gay marriage on moral grounds (or just because they find it distasteful) change their position? No. Must they, as citizens of a free society, stand aside and allow their fellow citizens to exert their inalienable rights as freely as they themselves can? Yes.

Obama has finally admitted, publicly, that he has reached a similar conclusion. He probably did it a long time before he was willing to tell us about it, but whatever. It’s out there now. And know this: No matter how Obama’s declaration redounds during this election year, gay marriage is going to become a reality in all 50 states. Soon. And when it does, the history books will give him “a whole lot of credit” (as Mitt Romney says, hilariously, on another issue) — and eventually the 48 percent of the public that hasn’t yet evolved to the extent he has will wonder what they were fighting about. Or at least their kids will wonder, and they’ll wonder why their parents didn’t have the same courage (or common sense) that their president had in 2012.

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For the first time in a generation, a competitive race is percolating in my congressional district in Ventura County, California. Our state cherishes its reputation as a laboratory for American democracy, but in this district, in this election, our most recent experiments are proving quite combustible indeed – thanks to a representative’s retirement, a nonpartisan redistricting, and California’s first-time shift to an open primary system. The major parties, special-interest PACS, and other outside groups are preparing to flood our district with campaign cash, and with good reason – the outcome here may have profound ramifications for control of the next Congress, and even the future of our elections process. The first column in this series outlined the broad parameters of the race; over the next few weeks I’ll be profiling the candidates and covering the run-up to the June 5 open primary.

There’s a low-key rebellion underway in California – a challenge to the two-party system, with the potential to change the way Americans elect their leaders – and Linda Parks is leading the charge. The three-term county supervisor and onetime mayor of Thousand Oaks is one of more than 30 declared congressional candidates statewide whose ballot lines will read not “Democrat,” not “Republican,” but “No Party Preference.” And among them all, Parks has (by far) the best chance of withstanding the impending flood of major-party and PAC funds, and making her way to Washington in the fall.

The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call has already profiled her, and last week in the Daily Beast, Bush strategist-turned-paragon of moderation Mark McKinnon praised her as a “fighter” who has “seen the enemy within … the two-party system.” Parks herself is well aware of what she’s up against – and she’s got a strong sense of her possible impact. “This is historic,” she says, matter-of-factly. “It’s game-changing, at a time when Congress is broken and less popular than ever. People are ready for the hyper-partisanship and the special-interest influence to get fixed, and they have a great opportunity to do something about it right here. The open primary and the redistricting that have happened in California have made it possible for a moderate like me to get elected.

“This is not just a congressional campaign. It’s a statement, a movement against partisanship and against special-interest money. I never aspired to run for Congress. It’s the state of the nation, not personal ambition, that’s driving me. And if I’m successful, getting elected as a moderate without support from the special interests, there will be others who follow in my wake.”

Heady stuff, to be sure. Then again, Parks told me all of this not in some flag-festooned office or ballroom somewhere, but in between smoothie sips outside a strip-mall Jamba Juice. And she did so after responding to an interview request I had left on an answering machine whose outgoing message intoned, “You’ve reached the Parks family … and Linda Parks for Congress.”

Clearly, this isn’t a conventional campaign for federal office. And it’s particularly unconventional that  a candidate who has pledged not to take special-interest or PAC funds in a race certain to be deluged with them, who refuses to say whether she’ll vote for John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi as speaker if she makes it to Capitol Hill — and who, to be honest, seemed to go unrecognized by her own constituents during our half-hour conversation at Jamba Juice — must nonetheless be considered a front-runner in the upcoming primary.

She may not be a rock-star candidate, or even the most charismatic figure in her own race. But Parks boasts sky-high name recognition and popularity within the state’s newly drawn 26th Congressional District, and she has already proven she can withstand an onslaught of major-party money and mud while campaigning on a shoestring. Two years ago she cemented her local stature, and captured the attention of underdog rooters nationwide, while turning back an exhorbitantly funded, and surprisingly nasty, challenge for her Board of Supervisors seat from the wife of her current Republican opponent, state senator Tony Strickland.

“I haven’t run a congressional campaign before, but this is the way I run campaigns – very grass-roots,” she says. To that end, she is relying for advice (and yard-sign-planting muscle) on a devoted network of friends and neighbors – some of whom happen to be handy with video equipment. It was while putting their (unpaid) skills to use that Parks hit upon an idea that created some major buzz locally: a television ad that aired on cable systems for two weeks, and ended with her looking into the camera and saying, “I’m Linda Parks, I’m running for Congress, and I approved this message … and my favorite flavor of ice cream is Rocky Road.”

That oddball mashup of the personal and political has provoked responses ranging from quizzical to dismissive to delighted. One Ventura Republican wrote to the local paper that it “borders on insulting that this is how she plans to win favor.” But Parks says the more typical reception has been more of the Reagan-and-jelly-beans variety. “Wherever I go now, people are telling me what their favorite ice cream is. I’ve been attending a lot of coffees around the district, and people are starting to serve Rocky Road for me.

“You can’t take yourself too seriously,” she adds. “The issues are serious, of course, but I think it’s important to show a personal side. So many politicians are out there trying to be slick, and this ad resulted in separating me from the pack. I don’t see any negatives about it.”

Creating a bit of well-defined space for herself – particularly before the clearly panicking Democrats succeed in defining her negatively — is vital to Parks’ prospects. I wrote a couple weeks ago about the Democrats’ struggle to settle on a candidate, and the emerging likelihood that Parks will deny the party a slot in the general election (and an opportunity for a key pickup in its effort to recapture the House). The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has responded by launching an unusual (and unseemly) line of attack against Parks – dumping a 50-page dossier of material about her personal and professional life onto the internet. Gleaned from a blanket Public Information request, the DCCC’s spreadsheet covers everything from her family’s mortgage history to her husband’s business interests to the lawsuits against which she, along with other members of the Thousand Oaks City Council or county Board of Supervisors, have been required to defend themselves in the normal course of government business.

It’s the raw material for a sophisticated opposition-research effort, uploaded for public consumption. At first glance there appears to be nothing remotely disqualifying in the document dump, but it is precisely by piecing together innocuous details into somehow-squalid themes that oppo-research professionals earn their keep – whether they work for opposing campaigns or special-interest Super-PACs. (Never mind the potential for mischief – robbery, identity theft, etc. – created by the publication of a candidate’s address and other personal information on the internet.)

“There’s an incredible amount of positive information in there, actually,” Parks says with a laugh of annoyance, as much as irony. “How I was the thriftiest supervisor of all, the fact that I returned the most money to the general fund out of my [city council] office. But they’re not going to pick the good stuff. There’s also a lot of raw footage of me out there on the internet, filmed at the [early-April] Latino Forum and other events. It’s not just footage of me talking – it’s of me just standing there, while other candidates are talking. And the reason why it’s all there is so the parties and the PACs can use their money and that research to attack me.”

For her own part, Parks has remained positive in both her TV spots to date, but quickly bristles when asked what she thinks of Strickland (who, as the only Republican in the race, is expected to advance to the general election in a well-financed cakewalk). “I think of him as the opposite of me,” she says. “He takes special-interest money, and he does what they want him to do. You can always tell how he’s going to vote by whichever industry has paid him. He takes from industries that are not the most wholesome ones – from tobacco, big oil, the health-insurance companies. And these interests are getting loopholes created just for them, which leaves the public out in the cold.”

Perhaps anticipating her need to attract significant support from moderate Democrats in the primary, Parks seems intent on playing more nicely with her four Democratic competitors on the ballot. She’s even reluctant to go after the woman generally considered her toughest challenger for a spot in the general election, a state assemblywoman from Santa Monica named Julia Brownley who moved into the district to compete for the seat. Other opponents have called Brownley a “carpetbagger” with “Santa Monica values,” but this is as far as Parks will go: “I think she’s done a good job representing Santa Monica and their interests, but I don’t think their interests coincide with Ventura County’s. Her record speaks for itself. I’m not going to criticize her.”

As the Democrats and, sooner rather than later, Republicans gear up their attacks against Parks, their most powerful arguments probably will focus on opportunism and uncertainty. Parks changed her voter registration from Democratic to Republican back in the 1990s, when she first ran for the city council in conservative Thousand Oaks. Seats on both the council and the county Board of Supervisors are nonpartisan positions, but her GOP registration no doubt helped sustain her popularity among voters – even as she frequently asserted moderate-to-liberal positions on environmental and other issues, and occasionally endorsed Democratic candidates (including Strickland’s opponent in his 2008 state-senate race). Parks trumpeted her iconoclasm, if not necessarily her “independence,” while decimating Strickland’s wife, Audra, by a 62-39 margin to retain her supervisor seat two years ago. And when she threw her hat in the congressional ring this past winter, she teased the electorate for a month before announcing that she would change her voter registration once again, this time to “Decline to State,” and run as an independent.

Thousands of local Republicans are unlikely to forgive her apostasy – even though, as she notes, “I’d never get the GOP’s endorsement, not after they spent half a million dollars attacking me in 2010. But I have support from a lot of both conservative and moderate Republicans — particularly those who are frustrated with the partisanship. A lot of them are feeling disenfranchised — they don’t recognize their party anymore, and I was really feeling that. The extremists have just taken that party off the deep end.”

On the other hand, however, thousands of local Democrats (including, admittedly, myself) inevitably will look at her shifting party registrations and wonder exactly who Parks is, and what she might do once in office. Will she campaign as a moderate independent because it broadens her electoral base against Strickland, then join the GOP caucus? What if the House is evenly split after November, and she becomes responsible for perpetuating the Republican majority? And can a House member who refuses to embed herself within either party effectively bring home the bacon for her district?

“I’ve never been attacked by the Democratic Party before — that’s something new for me,” Parks says. “Some Democrats have asked, ‘Why couldn’t you have run as a Democrat? We could have supported you!’ But that says more about party loyalty, rather than voting for the best candidate – and that’s part of what this campaign is trying to change.”

Besides, she notes, some experts believe that in an environment as closely divided and poisonous as Capitol Hill, a truly independent freshman may actually be more effective than a partisan back-bencher. “Compared to a Democrat or Republican walking in the door, I believe I’ll have a lot more influence because [my presence] will be a mandate against hyper-partisanship. The nation’s going to be watching. The press is going to be watching. And they’ll be looking to see, ‘How are they going to play with Linda?’

“I’ll be open to any legislator who has a good bill, and I think that will engender a little respect. When it comes down to it, [the parties] need votes, and they’ll see they can get my vote if they have a good bill. And if it comes down to my vote being the one that determines who the speaker of the House is, I’ll take that to the bank. I’ll see what I can parlay that into for our country, and for my district. I’ll want to talk with the party leaderships and see who is more interested in bipartisanship, in working together, and not playing to the extremes. And I’ll want to see who is more interested in the things I’m interested in, such as trying to reduce the special interests’ influence in Congress.”

Before she can do any of that, of course, she’ll have to face down those exact interests between now and November. The kind of party and PAC spending expected this year is unheard-of in congressional races around these parts – primarily because retiring GOP stalwart Elton Gallegly was never at serious risk during any of his 13 campaigns dating back to 1987. It’s unclear, as yet, how all that money will be spent; conventional wisdom holds that the most effective method for reaching local voters is the mass mailer, not the purchase of pricier TV or radio time – which made Parks’ first-on-the-air “Rocky Road” ad buy (estimated at $45,000) even more eye-raising.

So far, even though the DCCC has laid down a marker with that dossier, Strickland, the four Democratic challengers, and their well-heeled supporters have mostly kept their powder dry and their moneybags stowed. That should change in the coming week or two, particularly in the wake of next Monday’s (May 7) debate – the only one of the primary campaign expected to feature all six candidates. “In the background, I keep hearing the roar of those planes that are about to fly over and bomb our poor little county,” Parks says. “We’re going to be inundated.”

Between now and early June, she adds, “my strategy is just to keep standing. That was my strategy when Audra Strickland spent three-quarters of a million dollars to try and beat me in 2010, and it’ll be my strategy now. The Democrats are going to hit me with everything they’ve got – slime me, slander me, libel me, whatever they can do to see that I don’t advance to the general. All the candidates on that side who want to be in the general are going have to knock down Linda. Not just the candidates, but the PACS and the Super-PACS, are going to spend millions of dollars on both sides, and it’s mostly going to be aimed at me.

“I just have to keep standing.”

A few minutes after she said that, her cell phone rang and she quickly picked up her smoothie and excused herself. During our interview I had gone to some length to explain why, despite my fascination with her candidacy and my shared passion for curbing special-interest influence in Washington, I was pretty sure I would have to vote for a Democrat in the primary. For me, denying the Republicans a continued majority is a higher priority than sending an iconoclast to Congress, and I would be unable to forgive myself if my vote for Parks kept the Tea Party in power.

Despite these protestations, a couple minutes after Parks departed my phone dinged with a fresh text message: “Want to come unload some yard signs?” Parks texted over the address, and off I went. Of course I went. I may not (yet) be able to wrap my head around voting for her next month, but how could I refuse the opportunity to lend an iconoclast some unpaid muscle?

Next week’s column will feature details from the May 7 debate, and discuss the Democrats’ self-made dilemma as the June primary approaches.

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When you’re a politics junkie like I am, but live in a state as resolutely blue as California, it’s easy to envy folks in other states who spend their leap years on the front lines of presidential campaigns that I’m doomed to watch from afar. Compounding my covetousness is the fact that I’ve lived for the last nine years in conservative Ventura County, in a congressional and state-assembly district that has long been exquisitely gerrymandered to keep electing Republicans in races that weren’t even vaguely competitive.

Happily, though, this year we V.C. suburbanites – thanks to the mad genius of California’s notoriously fickle voters – find ourselves smack-dab in the middle of one of the nation’s most captivating congressional races. It’s a campaign that promises to be a real humdinger, bringing together many of the discordant, corrupting, frustrating and fascinating linchpins of contemporary political combat: voter initiatives and their consequences, a game-changing redistricting, an open seat, an influx of party and PAC money, a grudge match between longtime rivals, special-interest jockeying … and even a well-liked independent with an excellent chance of winning, who plans to spend the campaign blasting the partisan logjams in both Washington and Sacramento.

There are plenty of races around the country that are being transformed by redistricting and retirements, or merely by the voters’ shifting moods. But this  campaign, here in my home district, is so intriguing for so many reasons that — at least until the June 10 primary, and hopefully right through November – I can’t imagine a better use for this space than to delve into the intricacies of the candidates’ positioning on issues, and in relation to one another; the strategic and financial maneuverings of the local and national parties, as well as the outside groups that currently are plotting to plow money into the race; and the electorate, locally and statewide, that (brilliantly or foolishly) created the scenario that’s playing out. Sure, it’s a local race for one congressional seat — but it’s also a laboratory for trends that are shaking up politics nationwide. And with control of Congress very much up in the air this fall, every competitive race comes with very high stakes.

First, let’s explore how the race got to its current point:

In 2008 and 2010, Californians passed a pair of ballot initiatives taking the process of drawing new legislative districts out of the hands of Sacramento politicians, who had perfected the art of creating airtight partisan lines to ensure their own survival. Voters instead entrusted the task to a non-partisan commission made up of everyday citizens. Meanwhile, a third initiative ditched the state’s traditional primary-election system in favor of open primaries — in which all candidates for a particular office appear on the same initial ballot, with the top two vote-getters (regardless of party affiliation) moving on to the general election.

These changes were pitched as fixes for California’s dysfunctional political cesspool – and trust me, our cesspool is more fetid than your cesspool, wherever you are (unless you’re in Louisiana, maybe). The redistricting commission seems to have done its job with precisely the unblinking neutrality intended, eliminating many of the more preposterous gerrymanders and creating districts across the state that, for the first time in years, are forcing incumbents of both parties to actually work to defend their seats…

…or else decide not to defend them at all. As it’s turned out, so many members of California’s congressional delegation are retiring this year that state leaders of both parties (most prominently Nancy Pelosi) have begun lamenting our impending loss of seniority (and influence) in the Capitol. Among those heading for the exits is Ventura County’s 13-term Republican congressman, the immigration-obsessed and thoroughly undistinguished Elton Gallegly, who previously tried to retire in 2006 before Karl Rove personally bullied him into remaining on the ballot. His departure leaves an open seat in a district that has shifted this year from a 15-point GOP edge among registered voters to a 6-point advantage for Democrats. Even more telling, the new district split by a single percentage point in the last gubernatorial election.

Rushing in to fill the void on the Republican side, to absolutely no one’s surprise, was state senator Tony Strickland – half of a husband-and-wife tag team that has long sought to dominate local politics. He served in the state assembly from 1999-2004, and when he was term-limited out of the post, his wife Audra took his place. But when Audra herself completed her last term two years ago, a funny thing happened on the way to Strickland ubiquity – she chose to challenge a popular, independent-minded incumbent county supervisor, ran a nasty and partisan campaign for a job that is, by law, nonpartisan … and ended up losing badly.

The woman who beat her was former Thousand Oaks mayor Linda Parks – and wouldn’t you know it, now Parks has set her sights on taking down another Strickland, and moving to Washington herself. What’s most compelling about Parks’ candidacy isn’t the promise of an ugly and personal battle with the Stricklands — it’s the route she’s taking to reach that battle. The moderate Parks has been a registered Republican for years, ever since she first ran for city council in conservative Thousand Oaks. But when she announced her candidacy for Congress this winter, she spent a month teasing the electorate – would she challenge Strickland for Republican supremacy? would she revert to her long-ago status as a Democrat? – before finally choosing to run as an independent.

There’s been plenty of speculation since then about whether Parks’ move was made with (non)ideological sincerity, or with cool electoral calculation. Typically, of course, independents have difficulty battling the party-endorsed candidates’ financial and organizational resources. But Parks has higher name recognition than most of her opponents, not to mention a history of using non-partisanship to her advantage. And in an open primary she may, in fact, be more likely to make the top two in a traditionally GOP-leaning district by splitting the difference, rather than by becoming a Democrat. In any case, since her announcement the unshackled Parks has worn her independence as a badge of honor, sweetly savaging rivals on both sides for their special-interest ties and – most controversially – refusing to state which party she’ll caucus with, or whether she’ll vote for John Boehner or Pelosi as Speaker of the House, should she be elected. I’ll have plenty more to say about all of that in my next column.

As if Parks’ unusual stance, and her blood feud with the Stricklands, were not enough to keep the campaign cauldron at a boil, her prospects for success in the open primary have received a boost from the muddled and contentious state of affairs among local Democrats. Several stepped up for the race, then dropped out, before and after Gallegly’s retirement – including a colleague of Parks’ on the Board of Supervisors who was considered the party favorite until he quit last month. The local party, perhaps unprepared to deal with the first campaign in years in which it actually has a fighting chance, has been unable to settle on an endorsement – leaving no fewer than four Democrats on the primary ballot, most of them representing constituencies potentially big enough to split the progressive vote, propel Strickland and Parks into a Dem-free general election … and, if November plays out as closely as projected across the nation, possibly even deny the Democrats an opportunity to retake the House.

The closest thing to a Democratic-establishment favorite is Julia Brownley, a state assemblywoman with an impressive record, lots of friends in high places, and just one problem: Until very recently, she lived in Santa Monica. She is a viable candidate in the redrawn congressional district because it includes towns she has served in the assembly. Still, despite her move into the district this winter, she faces inevitable charges of carpetbagging – and, in an area as politically conservative as Ventura County, she is already being pilloried for her “Santa Monica values.” (Even Santa Monica’s own residents cheerfully call their town “the People’s Republic.”)

Brownley is racking up endorsements from key party leaders — who, some have complained, also have begun pressuring her competitors to bow out of the race. For now, at least, she faces competition for key constituencies from two intraparty rivals. Jess Herrera, a district commissioner from heavily Hispanic Oxnard, recently won a landslide victory in a straw poll held after a forum for Hispanic voters. David Cruz Thayne, a small-business owner (he’s a tennis coach) and the son of a Uruguayan immigrant, is emphasizing Hispanic issues as well, but is also playing up his business background in an attempt to appeal to more moderate voters. (A fourth Democrat, real estate broker Al Goldberg, so far has exhibited neither a serious grasp of issues nor sufficient organizational skills to make his candidacy viable – he was shut out of the Hispanic forum because, he said, he sent his confirmation email to the wrong address.)

Goldberg’s bumbling exemplifies the key element that’s missing from this race so far: a candidate with enough “star power” to match the stakes in the race. Perhaps sensing the need to break out of a relatively faceless pack, Parks called attention to herself on Wednesday by launching the campaign’s first TV ad – which she concludes by stating, “I approved this message … and my favorite ice cream is Rocky Road.”

Not exactly a star-making television debut, perhaps. But this race features such a compelling narrative that local voters and politicos nationwide have no choice but to stay tuned. Next week I’ll have more analysis of Parks’ unorthodox candidacy, and her chances of winning (and shaking up the system if she does).

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Mitt Romney tries out his brand-new joy buzzer.

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Some, if not all, have asked me why I am so cynical. Why do you always believe, given the chance to do well or to do harm, humans will do harm, they wonder aloud. In defense of my negativity, we have seen all through human history the inherent man’s-inhumanity-to-man. I reply with Emmett Till, Victor Jara, the children who were strapped to their car seats when their mother pushed the car into the lake. For some, Cain slew his brother Abel. For others, better caves were acquired by beating in the heads of the occupants with rocks.

I promise you, the rest of this post won’t be as much of a downer…maybe. I suppose it all depends on how much kum-bah-yah you require to exist upon. I do expect you will feel a slight bit of uplift knowing you couldn’t possibly be as dumb as the people who either vilified or supported the following examples.

Rebecca Black “Friday” – Just about a year ago, young Rebecca Black’s music video “Friday” landed on YouTube. To say it was a hit is an understatement. To say it was particularly good is an overstatement. It is, above all, a song performed by an unseasoned thirteen-year-old girl and, as such, could have been far, far worse than it is. There is a reason why my cassette recordings from my youth spontaneously combusted into flame, smoke, and curdled blobs of plastic.

Yup, I had no hand in that at all.

You are not stupid to have watched the video. You’re not even stupid if you admit to liking it a little bit. I don’t particularly like it myself, but I like that Black pursued her dreams as she did. Too bad I am a minority on this, as the song quickly became an internet meme, the butt of jokes, and believe it or not, the instigation of online death threats against Black. Adult television celebrities openly and cruelly mocked her song and her as if their youthful efforts didn’t bite it (heck, some of these “adults” professional efforts still bite it!) Black’s parents withdrew her from school and she is now being taught at home. This is to protect her from the taunting and abuse that came in tandem with her pursuit.

But kids are cruel by nature and are, therefore, exempt because they’re too young not to be so stupid, right? Follow me, Ebenezer. There are three shadows more.

Coca Cola Christmas Can – This past Christmas season Coca Cola introduced a holiday-themed can based on their perennially popular polar bear characters. The can was actually kind of an elegant design, but it was also a shiny, silver one. The marketing team at Coca Cola probably assumed, “Well, nobody’s going to simply ingest products without reading the contents of the label, right?”

Wrong! An outpouring of anger forced the company to withdraw the design and replace the cans with the standard red cans. It seems that the ‘erudite’ purchasing community did, in fact, run to the store and buy the regular Coke believing it was the Diet Coke, all the while probably thinking (if only to remind their little pea-brains), “Diet silver! Me buy silver! Me drink silver! Me good consumer!” The complaints ranged from slightly peeved of the “that was a poor choice in design” variety all the way up to claims of nefarious conspiracies of keeping America obese. After all, we have no control over what we ingest. Packaging designers lift the products to our mouths and make us eat it.

On the plus side, some stores still have some cans left. #FutureCollectorsItem

The Artist – They also make us watch brand-new black and white silent films! Oh mercy! Several audiences were up in arms with the Weinstein Company and their distribution of the Oscar-nominated film The Artist. Nobody told them it was a silent film in black and white; not the black and white posters for it, nor the marketing campaigns that touted a “modern black and white silent film,” nor all the critics and write-ups that specified it was a silent, black & white movie. Through all of those warnings, nobody told them! Nobody!! Demands were, once again, made. Threats of lawsuits promised. Somewhere out there, Vin Diesel readies The Fast And The Furious Six, rubs his hands insidiously, and cackles, “Muahhh-haah-haaahhh!!”

The Artist should have been rated R-G: Goobers not permitted without a guardian with at least a high school education.

Those Who Continue To Make Excuses For The Republican Candidates For President of the United States – I’ll try not to get too political here. Pres. Obama was not the savior so many were hoping for. He got a lot wrong in his first term. He also got a lot right, but it really has nothing to do with him. If a competent, relevant, and relatively trustworthy conservative competitor was up against him, it wouldn’t really have anything to do with them either. Nor does it have much to do with the pack of presumed candidates of pseudo-intellectuals and money-shufflers.

It’s all about those who still claim today, as they claimed when Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain were in the race (and Donald Trump kept flirting with), that any one of them would be better than Obama.

I have several very conservative friends who say, unequivocally, that they cannot in good conscience vote for Obama but will not vote for any of their own candidates. Why, asked I. “Because they all suck,” they say. “They suck, and the RNC sucks for not banning them somehow and demanding at least one worthwhile contender. They have tried to deflect their hatred of the Democrats and bounce it off on us, making us the ones at fault for voting for such a bunch of losers, rather than taking the blame for mismanagement of their party.”

Another said, “I don’t intentionally seek out crap. I try to get the best. Why does the party I am affiliated with think so little of me that they would expect me to buy into these (jerks*)?”

(*Trust me – I severely cleaned it up for our more sensitive readership.)

And yet there is still a small army out there that say this F-Team, bench-riding, last-place, nose-picking, mouth-breathing, soldier-bashing, grandma-evicting, cancer-patient-ignoring lot of amoeboids is, one and all, better than Obama on his best day. They probably also enjoy drinking Drano accidentally, watch Charlie Chaplin films with the Insane Clown Posse dubbed over, and have on more than one occasion issued fatwa upon tween-age children.

2012 may be our last year, but not because of Mayan apocalypse. We’re too stupid, as a species, to justify our continuance.

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It’s a damn fascinating time for the social art of protest. We’re living in an era when coordinated protest is arguably more effective than it has ever been. Even in cases much smaller and less drastic than the instantly legendary Arab Spring, the speed and power of mass demonstration is pretty staggering. Consider the outcry over the proposed debit card fees the likes of Bank of America attempted to institute toward the end of 2011. The protest was so quick, so well coordinated and so plugged into the media stream that it actually compelled change almost immediately. The mass exodus of customers to credit unions and small, local banks helped, but even that direct action wouldn’t have been as vast without the mass communication available to the millions of little guys and girls affected by the fees.

The recent hullabaloo surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act is a similar, though not identical, case. Those two pieces of legislation have been fuel to the fire of Internet activism from the moment they hit newsfeeds, but the blaze burned especially hot this week as the debates in the Senate and House over the bills drew near. It wasn’t just the little folks protesting a perceived injustice this time. Big organizations like Wikipedia, WordPress and Google made sure to put their displeasure in the headlines, some with more drastic action than others. The end result? Both bills have been shelved.

That’s great for the opponents of SOPA and PIPA, but it’s not the end and they know it. The protests aren’t ending because the bills haven’t been killed yet. The few supporters they still have in Congress may try to revive them when the furor has died down. Of course, that’s assuming it will die down.

This gets at the core of why SOPA and PIPA are poorly constructed bits of legislation. The people who wrote and sponsored them simply don’t understand the Internet. Folks on the Web don’t… let things go very easily. It’s not like the mainstream news cycle. Trending stories, however ephemeral they seem, don’t vanish from the docket when they’re no longer fresh. Websites stay live, forums keep fomenting debate and the protest stays active, if even in a semi-dormant form. Right now the lion’s share of the independent video games industry (the fastest growing segment of the games industry as a whole) is coordinating a boycott of E3, the most important and profitable gaming convention of the year. They’re doing so because the lobbyists for most AAA game publishers haven’t withdrawn their support for the now torpid copyright bills. They’re keeping the discussion rolling, which is all it takes to launch an entirely new campaign of protest should SOPA, PIPA or any similar legislation rise again.

Even as the federal government cracks down symbolically on Megaupload, one of countless streaming services on the Internet, there’s a sense that the interests behind Internet censorship are fighting a force that’s too large and well organized to overcome. In America, our legislators don’t know how the deepest parts of Internet culture work, so they don’t anticipate the backlash they’ll receive whenever a corporate body tries to make bank on a new set of laws to the detriment of everything the current Internet stands for. Since it’s not likely the politicians who hop aboard the bad-ideas-on-wheels that are SOPA, PIPA and other such misinformed bills are going to become more Web-savvy any time soon, it seems like we’ll be stuck in the cycle of lobbying and protest for the foreseeable future. The protesters certainly aren’t hanging up their hats yet, or possibly ever.

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Finally, some voting! (Well, some caucusing, really, but it’s practically the same thing.) Tuesday’s evening of Republican politicking in Iowa told us little to nothing we didn’t already know about the GOP field, but it did leave a distinct impression about the party’s base – a distinct odor, really. It’s the whiff of desperation, the stench of a mob that has worked itself into a sweat railing against all the stuff it doesn’t want … but can’t begin to agree on what it does want.

And how is a party that can’t answer a simple question – what, exactly, are you for? – supposed to run a country?

The issues that divided the Iowans who voted variously for Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are not small ones, and my guess is that they won’t be resolved quickly or easily. That’s not to say the GOP nominating contest will drag on terribly long, or be particularly suspenseful; my guess is that Romney, coming out of next week’s big win in New Hampshire, will simply out-organize and outspend the poorly funded (and that’s being generous) Santorum into submission by the end of the month. Romney may not win South Carolina – who will win it is anybody’s guess, and doesn’t really matter — but once Floridians vote in late January Romney will be able to coast into the summer, with Paul serving as little more than the belligerent schnauzer nipping at his heels.

That’s the way Republicans do things, organizationally speaking – they coalesce early, and move on to the bigger fight. But that’s the easy part – the establishment settling on a frontrunner and clearing his path. The trouble is that the frontrunner isn’t really the man for his moment. Has there ever been such a disconnect between the obvious passions of a party’s base and the wishy-washy lethargy of its likely standard-bearer? Even John Kerry had more of a purchase on his party’s ideals than does poor Mitt — who, according to a healthy majority of Republicans, may as well be John Kerry.

Iowa did the party no favors by spending six months sifting through one non-Mitt after another before finding a wingnut who couldn’t be grounded before caucus night. Really, it’s just Santorum’s dumb luck that he was the last bit of fetid, right-wing cream to rise to the top after Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich had all been skimmed. (What other metaphors can I offer – musical chairs, perhaps?) It’s not that Santorum is any more electable than the others¸ or less anachronistic in linking tired and failed ideas to bizarre bellicosity. It’s just that Iowans ran out of time while he was taking his turn atop the leader board. My guess is that Santorum’s social-conservative extremism won’t survive a week of media scrutiny or super-PAC bludgeoning – not that it matters, since Santorum is practically penniless and couldn’t begin to staff up in time to take advantage of his moment in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul sits atop his bizarre human pyramid of cranks and contrarians, assured of a steady 20 percent of the GOP electorate … but with no hope of expanding on that rabid base to become a real factor in the national race. Paul is attracting, in a funhouse-mirror sort of way, the kind of devotion that President Obama did back in 2008 – becoming a magnet for young people and anti-establishment types who are (in many cases) simply looking for an alternative to the people and ideas that have been spoon-fed to them. Of course, that’s where the similarities end between Obama’s appeal and Paul’s – not least because, while the power of Obama’s charisma and the mainstream appeal of his ideas enabled him to build a level of support that could beat Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, Paul has all the personal appeal of a dungeness crab, not to mention foreign-policy ideas that are only attractive until one spends five seconds considering their consequences. And then, of course, there’s Paul’s history of racism and the other enormous character flaws that those 20 percent of Republicans can choose to ignore, but no one else will. (Not that Randian selfishness isn’t a character flaw in itself, but I digress.)

Still, Paul’s staunch libertarianism – aside from his hypocritical stance on abortion – represents the id of contemporary wild-eyed conservatism, at least in terms of his domestic-policy ideas. End the Fed! Slash a trillion from the budget indiscriminately on Day One! Delete all regulations from the books! And you can bet that for every Republican who does support him, there are two or three who would love to do so, if only he would throttle back the isolationism and cheer up a little. (Or shave 20 years off his age, or grow a head of hair like Mitt’s, or lose that screech-owl voice. The racism, they can live with.)

As for Senator Holier-Than-Thou, it’s actually surprising that Iowa’s multitudinous social conservatives took so long to come around to him – or at least it’s surprising that they bothered kicking the tires on Cain and Gingrich for four months instead of moving directly from Perry to Santorum as the anti-Romney. Once Perry disqualified himself with his cowboy-Mr. Magoo act during the debates, Santorum became the obvious heir to Mike Huckabee – except, of course, for the fact that Santorum is a far less charismatic (though far more doctrinaire) bearer of the Falwell flame than the Huck was in ’08.

The person for whom I feel the most sympathy this week is, surprisingly, Bachmann, who saw the writing on the wall Wednesday morning and dropped out. Alone among the discarded anti-Mitts, the winner of the August straw poll didn’t really do anything to render herself unelectable (among Republicans, I mean – she’s horrifyingly unelectable in the real world). She merely was rendered an afterthought when the Perry campaign supernova’d, and she never regained her footing. She was perhaps the only candidate who might have found the sweet spot between Paul and Santorum’s constituencies, but this may not be the year when that particular twain shall meet.

So instead we have Paul inspiring the rabidly anti-government, Remember-Waco! set, and we have Santorum (for now) clutching the barely-beating hearts of his fellow fundamentalist scolds. Where does that leave Romney? The last two “movement conservatives” to win the White House, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, succeeded in tying the GOP’s small-government and social-conservative wings into a tidy bow of shared support – but so far in 2012 both those wings eye Mitt with the sort of suspicion and distaste with which a cotton farmer regards the season’s first boll weevil. As I said earlier, it seems pretty clear that Romney will be able to super-PAC his way to the nomination with little more messaging than “I alone can beat Obama.” But that will leave a key question for the general election: Can a man who inspires no passion – and who instead instills a sort of dread among those who should be a Republican nominee’s most ardent followers – actually pull enough voters to the polls to defeat an incumbent president?

Under fairly similar circumstances – facing presidents who were broadly loathed by the opposition’s base – both Bob Dole (in 1996) and Romney’s Democratic doppelganger, Kerry, discovered that the answer was “no.” (Of course, neither Bill Clinton nor W. was facing the kind of economic doldrums Obama faces, but that’s a topic for another day.) As for this column, I have one more tortured metaphor to offer: As Republicans have finally begun casting ballots this winter, Romney finds himself in the position of an animal trainer at the circus, locked in the ring with a pair of ravenous tigers just captured from the wild. One of two things is going to happen by November: Either Romney is going to figure out how to ride those tigers, or they’re going to eat him alive. At the moment I wouldn’t bet on either outcome, but it would help if Romney had a whip.

One more bit of information worth noting: In a year in which Republicans are supposed to be ginned up beyond belief to flock to the polls and swamp Obama, turnout on Tuesday was very close to what it was for Republicans in 2008 — which was about half the size of the Democratic turnout that year. Is that a reflection on the candidates, or evidence that Republicans are simply far louder than they are numerous?

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I’ve had a good life, and if you’re reading this, chances are you have too. I mean, we’re literate and we can afford electricity, at the very least, which puts us up on most of the human race throughout recorded history. But complaining about things is human nature — and it can also be pretty funny in the bargain — so we tend to let our many advantages fade into the context of our ordinary lives while we rail against problems both meaningless (goddamn piece of shit iPhone won’t work) and not (like, you know, war).

So yeah, we’ve got it pretty good. Great, even. But we also all have our individual crosses to bear — the imprints left on us by the hands we’ve been dealt, the lingering bitterness of traumas real or imagined, the cumulative weight of what life has done to make us who we are. Sometimes, we feel it; hopefully, more often than not, we don’t — but it always affects the sway and shuffle of our gait, and it has a fundamental effect on how we deal with the world around us.

Me, I’ve always been a little preoccupied with death and loneliness. I lost my father when I was five, both of us the victims of a heroin deal gone bad: he felt his heart give out as his panicked drug buddies left him in a grocery store parking lot in upstate New Jersey, while I grew up shrouded with a lingering ache and the hard-to-shake notion that I would never marry, never have children, and die, like my father did, before the age of 30. When I developed a heart tremor in my 20s, I just assumed I was rounding the final bend. It was a relief, in a way.

I met my wife when I was 26. My oldest child, our daughter Sophie, was born when I was 31. And as I close in on 40, I’ve learned to let myself peek out from that shroud, and although the ache never really goes away, I think it’s only deepened the poignancy of fatherhood for me. She’s six now — already older than I was when I had to start trying to figure out how to make sense of a world where anything could happen at any given moment — and because I still have faint memories of a time when it seemed like a sane, safe place, I deeply treasure every moment I’m here to help protect my kids from the darkness. They drive me crazy every day, but I do.

I’m writing this tonight because yesterday, a man in a neighboring town was killed in a horrible freak accident. He left behind three children whose mother is legally prevented from caring for them and no assets to speak of. Right now, those kids are trying to cope with insurmountable grief and a terrible reminder that the universe is vast and senseless, capable of doling out horror and beauty in random increments.

I don’t know this family personally, but these are small towns and nobody’s business is truly private. I do know that this man’s youngest child is a nine-year-old girl — nine! — who’s had to deal with loss after shitty loss (although none as terrible as this) for most of her short life. I know that even before yesterday, her belief in love — her faith in its permanence when it’s true — had been badly damaged. What can anyone tell her? What can anyone do now? Over time — I hope — she’ll come to understand that even when it does last, it can be a mixed blessing; that sometimes, we have to choose what to take from that love, and whether to let it consume us or carry us forward. Tonight, I hope she and her siblings can just stay sane. Stay together. Stay warm.

We’re all brushed by experiences like these from time to time, and if we’re lucky, that’s as close as we get to the razor’s edge between our carefully constructed lives and the pain of having them shattered. We shudder at the slobbering rictus behind our paper-thin walls, we count our blessings, we button up, and we carry on. Any other way leads to madness; we cope by surrounding ourselves with minutiae, aiming our anger at safe and distant targets, and forgetting that the universe is not our friend.

But here’s the thing. We do have it good, you and I, and that simple fact is a glorious, nut-kicking victory against the endless night. Every layer of protection we’ve acquired, every happy moment, every golden memory, every second foolishly wasted on clicks and texts and status updates — that’s a precious gift that we’ve carved from life’s stubborn hide with sheer strength of will or good fortune. They’re ours and we own them. We earn the dirt and blood under our fingernails just by breathing.

This is the time of year when tradition holds that we bring our friends and families close, and if you’re lucky enough to be able to do so, then celebrate that victory with every cell of your being. And if you can’t, start celebrating the fact that you’re reading words on a screen and work your way out from there. Not because things can always be worse and our problems are mostly pretty lame — although they can and they probably are — but because these moments are yours, and they’re good, and you took them with your own two hands, and you should be proud of that.

I know I am. And although I’m sure I’ll get bogged down in petty crap again soon enough, tonight I’m going to be still for awhile. I’m going to watch the lights blinking on the tree in the living room, and watch my children sleeping, and lie down next to my wife. And I’m going to count my blessings — which include every one of you reading these words — and I’m going to think of anything I can do to help those kids, no matter how clumsy or trivial. I’m going to sharpen my rage against the monster behind the door and I’m going to keep clawing at its hide until I can’t claw anymore.

Its hunger is rapacious, but we remain, and that’s what I’m going to celebrate this season: Our capacity for tenderness, our stubborn persistence, and — yes — our hunger, for the greatest of these, love, which we fumble and struggle with and curse even as we draw upon it for sustenance and inspiration. We can no more control it than we can turn away from its ruthless beauty.

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