It’s Time to Liberate the Candidates

George Orwell once said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Looking at the state of politics today, I think it’s time we liberated candidates who are running for office. They need to be free to tell us things we don’t want to hear.

Walter Mondale tried that when he was running for President in 1984, and famously promised to raise our taxes. For that, he was rewarded with the electoral votes of the District of Columbia and just one state – Minnesota, his home – in one of the most lopsided landslide defeats in the history of Presidential elections. (His opponent, Ronald Reagan, went on to raise taxes anyway.)

Since then, nearly all politicians either make a “no new taxes” pledge, refuse to say they favor raising taxes, or advocate tax increases for only a small segment of people or corporations, a segment that is calculated to avoid most voters – millionaires, oil companies – you know, the other guy. 

This brings to mind another famous quote, attributed to Senator Russell Long, who said that tax reform amounted to “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.”

Now, I don’t especially relish the thought of my own taxes going up, but it sure would be refreshing to hear a politician say something that is clearly true, but which no one wants to hear.

The “no tax increase” pledge is currently making a lot of news around the country. I don’t recall many candidates for local office in Loudoun County taking that pledge – which, for me, would be a red flag. In a county that’s going to be opening two or three more schools a year for the foreseeable future, such a promise would be difficult, if not jmpossible to keep, without scaling service levels back to an unacceptable level.

On the other hand, I don’t expect to hear a candidate say that taxes will have to go up, either. But it would be nice if candidates felt like they could speak the truth without being hammered in the polls.

At the local level, we are left with candidates for office who make the blandest of pronouncements, and not just about taxes. For example, if you want to run for the , here’s a platform that is just about guaranteed not to offend:

• We need to improve transportation – complete road projects and add more interchanges.
• To do so, we need work harder to get our “fair share” of funding from Richmond and the federal government.
• While we’re at it, we need to make sure that developers pay their fair share of the costs associated with their developments – roads, schools, parks, libraries, etc.
• We need to support our outstanding school system; however we also need to make sure they tighten their belts and spend wisely.
• We need to keep the tax rate as low as possible by rooting out waste, streamlining government, eliminating duplication of services, and finding efficiencies wherever possible. 

Sound familiar? If so, it’s because that’s what most of the candidates have been saying for years. And it is worth noting that these are all things most of us don’t mind hearing.

Imagine a candidate for the Board of Supervisors saying the following:

“We’ll probably need to raise taxes on everyone, not just the "other guy.’ If we want major transportation improvements, we’ll need a big increase in the gas tax to pay for them. As for getting more money from Richmond, forget it. We are perceived as the wealthiest county in the state, if not the entire country. Do you really think the rest of the state – some areas of which are desperately poor – will give us a bigger share than we get now? We can only expect so many proffers from developers before they walk away and build a ‘by right’ development with no proffers at all. And we really can’t control how the school system spends its money. That’s the School Board’s job.”

To be able to say something like this, candidates would have to be liberated to speak what they believe to be the truth, even if it’s what no one wants to hear. And they would probably also be liberated from ever holding public office, because it’s hard to imagine them ever winning an election.