Time For A Change

Both Southampton and Sag Harbor villages have just completed difficult political campaigns for mayor that have drawn criticism for their intensity. This is not how the founding fathers pictured politics, some might say.

Well, as Rick Ungar, a senior political contributor at Forbes, has noted, it’s difficult to find a nastier political campaign than the one for president in 1800, which pitted two founding fathers against each other: President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson, who was challenging him. They were, to put it mildly, not nice.

As in the local elections this year, the worst came not from the candidates themselves but supporters and surrogates. Mr. Ungar notes that one Adams surrogate, the president of Yale University, suggested that if there were a Jefferson victory, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of local prostitution.” A Connecticut newspaper took that a step further, saying a Jefferson victory would mean “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”

A journalist who supported Jefferson called Adams a “repulsive pedant” who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.”

So let us, for just a moment, catch our breath and stop clutching our pearls. Politics can very quickly become a fistfight. Even a race for village mayor can start to seem so consequential that heavy artillery is required. It happens.

But let’s just say: Maybe it shouldn’t.

Because village government — and school board races, and even town positions — are not about Politics with a capital “P.” There are elections, yes, but the campaigns should be simple matters of sketching a vision for forward motion that makes sense to neighbors. Candidates who spend time talking about their opponents are wasting precious time, precious ink, that could be used to make a better case for themselves.

For the first time, in the wake of village elections, there needs to be a conversation about boundaries. That includes with political advertisements published in our newspapers: Rarely has a local advertisement in these races crossed the line, especially since the law gives political ads a wide berth, and always has. But recent village elections have brought a remarkable influx of spending, and some of the advertisements were simply crass, sophomoric or not supported by facts. Rejected ads became a weekly issue; some that were published rankled many, for good reason.

New rules will be put into place for future elections — sadly, it’s come to that. But it must be stressed: This climate will only change if the candidates themselves refuse to allow it. Candidates should control their message, and if an outside group isn’t speaking for the candidate, he or she needs to very publicly denounce that message. A shrug is no longer an acceptable response, and neither is “she started it.” And voters must start holding all candidates — even those they support — to those standards.

It’s time for warring factions in the villages to come together and get past a frankly embarrassing spring. Village government is as local as it gets, and residents deserve to see every person treated with respect, every single time, disagreeing without becoming disagreeable. Stop pointing fingers, and start setting a higher bar for campaign conduct.

Mark Twain may or may not have said it: “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.” It’s also true of politics in general — and in the local arena, we all smell what’s in the air. Change it.