I'm sick & tired of being sick & tired

I just hung up on my 307th political "robo-call", this one from some downstate or out of state Republican campaign organization that didn't ask me to support their candidate – it told me what a pair of bozos Doug Hoffman and Bill Owens are.

This election to replace the departed John McHugh has morphed from a relatively innocuous upstate congressional race into what some people are apparently seeing as a referendum on Democratic leadership in Washington. Both the Republican and Democratic congressional campaign committees have poured outrageous amounts of money into the battle, usually without any consultation with their candidates.

And the race is also becoming a mini-referendum on factions within the Republican Party; the far right wing of the GOP, stung by recent repudiations at the polls, can try to reclaim control of the party if only Hoffman can beat DeDe Scozzafava. Imagine – an election within an election. Sounds like a Spike Jonze movie plot.

Unfortunately, the voters across the 23rd District end up being the losers. No one is really talking issues – they're too busy spewing party-line fooferaw, signing inane pledges and ducking the press who are trying, God bless 'em, to get the candidates positions on record. Might as well try to lasso a barn swallow.

"Politics as usual, the people be damned" could be the theme of this election, and while it would be nice to think this is an anomaly, you only have to cast back to either of the elections that put Darrel Aubertine in the Senate, and kept him there, to realize that partisan politics has grown far larger than the people the parties putatively represent.

And it's galling that serious efforts by journalists – I'm thinking immediately of Jude Seymour's Times story that pretty much supported Bill Owens's job creation claims – are being turned on their ear by party hacks who use headlines without any context to claim this or that egregiously incorrect position about their candidate, or about their opponent.

I don't care who wins this election. I'll probably break down in the voting, er, station, and vote for one of them. But I won't like it. I will come out of there knowing exactly why I register no party affiliation – I don't like rubbing elbows with a bunch of slimy, unscrupulous characters.