A Promising Sign Regarding Sign Desecration

Results of a new poll of North Carolina voters shows that when it comes to provisions of a new billboard bill, legislators who have felt insulated may finally be risking support at the ballot box.

As smoothly and many feel deceptively crafted as SB 320 and HB 304 were  by the billboard lobby, North Carolinians are overwhelmingly opposed to its provisions.

But bi-partisan voter opposition to bills that favor out-of-state billboard companies isn’t new.  More telling this time is that the opposition is strong regardless of gender and geography.

Historically, men have been less protective of scenic preservation but this time they poll even more opposed to these bills than women.

Opposition to provisions such as permitting digital even where they are now prohibited runs 2 to 1 in the northeast and southeast and 3 to 1 along the mountains and metro areas where cities have already permitted them.

Of course, opposition is also high across the age groups billboarders and their remaining advertisers are trying hardest to reach.  The poll shows 5-to-1 opposed for those between age 30 and 45, increasing to 8-to-1 opposed among those age 46-65.

Of particular note to the few advertisers still using billboards is the high turn-off to turn-on ratio they have among consumers they are hoping to reach.

But most revealing is how voters plan to hold supporters accountable.

For a decade now, studies have found that elected officials are rarely held accountable at the ballot box, in part, because “the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally,” opening the door for special interests.

This is why a tax loophole, one of the six largest, permits billboard companies to escape paying their share of taxes by claiming their profits are only “rents.” 

Ironically, “rent-seeking” is also the word economists use to describe when companies such as these work the political system to gain favorable treatment rather than working to create economic value in the marketplace.

Similarly, this new legislation would also create another big loophole, permitting thousands of illegal billboards to become legal overnight, further desecrating the North Carolina brand.

To further assault North Carolina taxpayers, if passed and signed by the Governor, this new legislation will also guarantee billboard companies millions of dollars for each one that is removed when it comes time to widen the roadway.

This, even though the courts have ruled the billboards parasitic property because they would have no value in the first place were it not for the taxpayer funded roadways.

However, according to the poll, Tar Heel voters recognize that this is essentially a tax increase on them to benefit out-of-state billboard companies, not exactly the kind of tax-shifting voters like.

This provision in the proposed North Carolina legislation made voters overall less likely to support a legislator who votes for the bill by almost 5-to-1, including 4-to-1 among Republican voters.

If voters remember and follow through come election time, this would represent a sea-change where elected officials are held more accountable for actions they felt were safe in the past because they harmed only those who were not their constituents.

It is a mistaken calculus often used by organizations such as chambers of commerce and more passively, some tourism organizations, which align with the 1/5th of Carolinians who ally with the billboarders, including some doing so in direct opposition to the wishes of businesses and residents in their communities.

This latest poll may reveal not just overwhelming opposition but emergence of a resentment that could drive North Carolina voters to ban billboards altogether one day as voters have in some other states.

Inattention Where It Most Matters

I read the news and I vote.  But frankly like a lot of people, I always end up on voting day finding myself standing there unprepared to make a choice for some offices.

A friend of mine recently pointed me to a solution.  In North Carolina, a non-partisan group, the North Carolina Center for Voter Education has teamed with UNC-TV to provide a website called the 2014 N.C. Voter Guide.

You plug in your address and the website takes you through your ballot, office by office, candidate by candidate with a summary of their background and positions.

At each step you can choose if you like to mark a preference and then at the end you can print out a completed ballot to take with you inside the voting booth.

It is also a place you can go to check your registration, find a polling place and see any new changes to voting requirements.

It is a lot easier to use than other past guides provided by news outlets which turned into something more like homework.

But I also wish there was a way when we vote, to reconsider candidates for whom we voted in the last election who have turned out to be a disappointment, even if just to send them a signal.

I’ve worked very closely, especially with state and local elected officials in my former life.

Sure, a few have been slimy, corrupt and passive aggressively smug in the realization that they won’t be detected behind the image they craft for public and media consumption.

But as a whole, locally elected officials are incredibly hard-working and honorable.

However, there have always been some, who once in office, seem to morph into someone else.  They go undetected even in personal interviews only to become the antitheses, once in office, of what you were led to believe when voting for them.

Maybe it is a case of what political science researchers call the “ego rent” some individuals begin to collect once elected to office.

Bored with executing the mundane policy preferences of constituents, pursuit of “ego rent” is why some start playing political games, making decisions based on incomplete or imbalanced feedback and ultimately fronting for special interests rather than voters.

But unfortunately, elections don’t come with a rescission period like there is for other decisions.

Local and state services represent about 40% of overall government spending and yet state decisions are often driven by officials for which only a few North Carolinians are given a choices.

For example, the horrific changes made a few years ago to clear cut public forestland along roadsides in favor of billboard blight was driven by just 19,381 voters, representing only one of the state’s 100 counties.

That is one of the inherent flaws in representative vs. popular democracy, the former now nearly obsolete.

But there is also growing evidence that as voters, we are far less likely to hold state and local officials accountable, even though they have far more influence over quality of life and the quality of the places we love.

There is also far too little news coverage in local elections.  Most is the superficial “he said, she said” type.  Taking editorial stances does not suffice for in-depth coverage and fact-checking.

For decades too, researchers have measured the bias toward national election coverage noting that in part, it is because it is easier and cheaper to cover.

Adverting simultaneous side-by-side fact-checking is no substitute, especially at the local level, where even cable channels do not reflect voting jurisdictions.

According to analysis by Borrell Associates, politicians and political organizations now spend $37 per eligible voter to sway opinion with media advertising, soon to be $51 in 2016, up 21% from the record setting 2012 Presidential election.

Are we really feeling more informed?  Or are the lies just getting more entertaining?  It is ironic that in the guise of so-called free speech this form is largely exempt from “truth in advertising” requirements.

At the local level, we also don’t have non-partisan, though often ideological, think-tanks making sense of budgets and rarely, okay never, are news outlets inclined or resourced sufficiently to go back through local decisions to analyze and report if the results were ever as claimed.

Voters also have no guarantee that the candidates are invested in the places they seek to represent, since many so-called local offices such as some levels of judges and prosecutors aren’t even required to be residents of the places they serve.

Partisan gerrymandering of districts over the last two decades have also estranged voters from those who are their only hope of representation in the legislature.

It is no wonder so many elections have such little turnout.  I feel patriotic when I vote but many now just don’t see the point.

Websites such as the one I noted at the beginning help.  But the systems needs an overhaul and not just the less than veiled partisan elimination of early voting days and I.D. complications.

Government and public policy has never been more complicated nor the news media less empowered to unwrap it than it is today.

It isn’t much enough to know that the closer government is to the people, the more trust we have in it today.  Even at the local and state level, it is about where it was during the Watergate Era and that isn’t saying much.

A friend of mind once rationalized the flat, dispassionate lack of defense of public policy by rationalizing that voters have a lot of ways to find that out.

Oh really?  Maybe that’s where reform needs to begin.

By making budgets and regulations easier to decipher, by requiring audits and reports on every outcome promised, by making democracy responsive.

Our Best Hope - 12,500 Fresh Eyes Each Day

Each day 12,500 young people in this country are reaching the age when they are old enough to vote in elections.  According to the Rock The Vote Scorecard issued this month, this is the “largest and most diverse generation in our country” but also “the most urban, mobile, interconnected and technologically savvy generation in history.”

By the time I turned old enough to vote, my optimism about civic involvement had already been crushed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy while I was a 15-year-old and sitting in biology class.

I learned he had died in the hallway on my way to literature class where our continued study that day of the then-three-year-old classic To Kill A Mocking Bird, took on even greater significance.

Five years later, while living in Los Angeles, the exercise of my civic duty was still deferred by mourning when first Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and then not long afterwards and only a few blocks from where I was living, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated after winning a Democratic Presidential primary.

My civic passion wouldn’t ignite until four years later when I supported Senator George McGovern’s campaign against President Richard Nixon and my politics had swung from the Goldwater Republicanism of my parents and grandparents to the other end of the ideological spectrum before finally setting in the center as an Independent, albeit a progressive-leaning one, where it remains today.

Sensitive to hypocrisy as most young people are, I hope this incoming generation of voters doesn’t feel equally betrayed and disenchanted to learn what just happened in the North Carolina Senate.

Lobbyists and profligate campaign contributions by the special interest-Outdoor Billboard Industry trumped democracy in a step backwards for preservation of North Carolina’s unique-sense-of-place by overriding the overwhelming, bipartisan public opinion which was opposed to the legislation.

Fortunately, thanks to the insistence of the House and intervention by Speaker Thom Tillis and outspoken Senators such as Richard Stevens, the sanctity of local ordinances such as Durham’s ban on billboards was preserved along local standards for tree cutting.  It is the rest of the state that is most at risk.

It hope these new young voters don’t waste time demonizing the intent of these special interests or the elected officials who fronted for them.  I suspect they are decent people who love their families but who are focused on narrow interests to the exclusion of the public interest.

I hope they also aren’t dissuaded from voting because the legislation on behalf of Outdoor Billboards isn’t the only or even the worst instance of blatant self-interest in this state’s history or even in the history of this nation under the guise of representative democracy.

I hope all new voters wade into the process without concern for party affiliation and vote for the people they think will best represent, not just their opinion, but the majority’s opinion and yet will have the courage to stand up against special interests and other things that are blatantly wrong.

Ultimately, with the aid of this new generation of voters, the State of North Carolina will ban billboards altogether just as other states such as Alaska, Vermont, Hawaii and Maine, where residents grasp the fact that greater scenic values outweigh the alternatives, have done.

The only question is whether it will be too late to save one of this state’s most enduring economic and quality-of-life assets, its scenic beauty.  Ironically, the aggressive over-reaching consequences of this new legislation may in the end bring that day closer.

I hope this new generation of voters finally turns the tide, like no other has been able to do, against the threat that lobbyists, special interests and beholden elected officials have to democracy.

Angry Voters Subject To Brain Freeze!

Many people can’t distinguish intense passion from anger. They have usually labeled me as “angry” as they do now my daughter who shares my passion.

There is one big difference between anger and a passion for debating and exchanging ideas. Scientists have learned that the brains of people who are angry tune out anything that differs with their opinions and neutral forums like news media just cement their brains.

People like Dr. Hank Jenkins-Smith term it in this Newsweek quote as “motivated reasoning.” Apparently angry people’s brains ignore any information that doesn’t reinforce or defend their prior perceptions and unfortunately prejudices, however unfounded in fact.

In my experience, there is an easy way to tell angry people from passionate or intense people. Agree with an angry person and they get even angrier. But match their body language or tell them you take it very seriously and a passionate person who just appears angry dials down the intensity.

That’s why angry voters can’t understand or grasp President Obama. He too “cool” under fire. Instead, angry voters rally instead to the soap opera antics of a Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck or the gubernatorial candidate who threatens to “take people out” or the candidate who made a fortune as CEO of World Wrestling (another type of soap opera, featuring vulgarity and hostility as entertainment!)

This must also explain why angry voters can’t grasp that the TARP bail-out funds are well on their way to being reimbursed and will likely make a profit for taxpayers. It is why they refuse to accept that the country and the world would have fallen into deeper recession if not depression and full economic gridlock had leaders at the time not made the tough decisions. In my opinion, they probably don’t believe we ever really landed astronauts on the moon.

That is also why they are so dangerous to a democratic republic. Sit home on voting day if you wish but keep in mind that while the people for whom angry people will vote make for great fodder for late night comedians….it won’t be funny at all what they can do to America.

Angry people are not only self-destructive, they are dangerous to others as well as themselves because they don’t believe there is much to lose. In my opinion, we don’t want America run by people who get their kicks by tapping into or amplifying angry people.

Remember, as an elected official once told me as I tried to reason with him: politics is personal, not logical. If you’re feeling anxious right now about the state of affairs or your own personal circumstances, just sit on your butt come November 2nd and let the 23% of voters who are angry and vengeful control the election.

You’ll soon be plenty angry!