Adrian Northrup

Every so often, our political system needs a little exfoliation.

After 12 years in power, the dried-up Republican leadership is getting sloughed off like dead flakes of skin to reveal, we can hope, something healthier and fresher underneath.

Democrat, Republican – in the grand scheme of things, it’s all incidental. After a while, any group of leaders runs out of ideas, gets too comfortable, and starts to wrinkle upon itself.

Doesn’t it feel good to exfoliate?
In the case of our political system, however, deep cleansing is never an easy process. The blemishes just won’t go down without a fight.

Enter the orgy of utter fecklessness that was the 2006 midterm election campaign season.

For some reason, the attack ads this year seemed more personal and vicious – and more pervasive – than ever. Chalk it up to Republican desperation to cling to power, Democratic disaffection with the state of affairs in this country or even to the growing presence of YouTube and salivating political bloggers from both parties, watching candidates every step of the way.

Like harsh chemical peels, these nasty treatments will never go away, because hey, they’re effective. But for the moment, it’s all over. As a final kiss-off to this wickedness, I think everyone, voters and politicians alike, needs to take a little time out and soothe the stinging, because, well, it just isn’t healthy. But first, let’s take a look back on some of the mud that’s been slung in the last few months.

In Tennessee, the Republican National Committee launched an ad playing off Democratic Senate hopeful Harold Ford’s visit to the Playboy mansion after the 2005 Super Bowl. The ad featured a shot of a scantily clad Caucasian woman saying, “I met Harold at the Playboy party” and telling the black senator to call her. The RNC pulled the ad after claims that it was racist.

Closer to home, who could forget the “Ron Kind pays for sex” spot? The ad, borrowed from a Republican running for the House of Representatives in North Carolina, said that Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., “pays for sex” because he voted against a GOP-sponsored amendment that would have canceled funding for five studies by the National Institutes of Health. The studies dealt with topics such as the spread of sexually transmitted infections among Asian sex workers (according to the ad, “the sex lives of Vietnamese prostitutes”), the effects of decreased sexual function on men’s quality of life as they age (“the masturbation habits of old men”) and women’s responses to pornography (the ad mentioned “teenage girls” while the grant made no mention of studying underage women).

Kind’s stance on the amendment – and that of many of the House members who helped defeat it – was that scientists, not politicians, should be responsible for reviewing and funding scientific studies.

But Republicans weren’t the only ones guilty of personal attacks. In Illinois, for example, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran an ad accusing Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., of supporting a ban on “classic books,” including an anthology that held works by Martin Luther King Jr., Laura Ingalls Wilder and Dr. Seuss. In fact, he supported legislation 14 years ago that would have given parents more say in the book-banning process but, in itself, would not have banned any book.

In Florida, the DCCC claimed that Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., profited from a “drug deal” after he voted for the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan and later sold his stock in a pharmaceutical company that wasn’t even affected by the bill.

Even though candidates know by now to take these things as they come, the spread of lies still pollutes the political process. According to The Washington Post, Kind laughed off the “Ron Kind pays for sex” ad – which even the Republican Party of Wisconsin denounced – but he later commented on the pitfalls of having to get together after a brutal campaign season and try to build working relationships with other politicians who had just spent the last few months tearing each other down. And we wonder why our representatives rarely build bipartisan consensus.

But now, it’s time to get all that hostility out of our systems. And given the unprecedented vitriol of this campaign season, I think our elected officials need to take unprecedented measures. Karmic moisturizer. Deep spiritual cleansing. It’s time to trade mudslinging for mud masks.

Figuratively speaking, of course.
Or, on second thought, maybe it really is time for a government-wide day spa outing.

There have to be some amazing spas in Washington. And yes, I know the majority of our senators and representatives are men, but the benefits of exfoliation know no gender (Axe, for example, makes Snake Peel, an exfoliating body scrub for men. I’ve heard its good stuff).

That goes for the rest of us, too. Take a little time out and de-stress. Work out your latent hostilities. After all, finals are around the corner anyway, so it’s a good turning point.

For the Democrats coming to power, the oppression they felt at being kept down bears keeping in mind. As the whole government recovers from the political cleansing process and the Democrats finally get to relish in their time in the sun, they need to remember that, eventually, that sun will age them too. But whether or not they age more gracefully than the GOP depends on how careful they are not to bask in the rays.