Campaign Sign Time

Published in the Desert Valley Times
March 8,2005

It’s city council campaign sign season where I live.
Personally, I like the explosion of color serenading me from every street corner, with plenty of reds, whites, blues, Bulldog greens, and even hot pinks screaming for my attention.
Also, I like the innocence of the signs, which manage to proclaim the munificent virtues of their sponsoring candidates without the vitriolic mud-slinging which tends to accompany most other forms of electoral come-ons.
You never see a sign that says “Vote for Joe Smith because Bob Brown has bad breath.”
The candidates save such cerebral exchanges for their brochures and anonymous phone solicitations.
As far as being a barometer to our sociological evolution as a community, this year’s signs show a certain sophistication, with most printed on plastic signboards with professional silk-screening.
It’s quite a leap over the hand-lettered or badly-stenciled hunks of whitewashed plywood that once lined the boulevard.
It’s good that the signs are more aesthetically pleasing.
It’s bad that the improvements are underwritten by bigger campaign warchests, because of the insidious nature of campaign contributions from special interests.
There is a real concern in some quarters because of the amount of money being poured into the campaigns by developers.
Fortunately for the citizenry, many of the developers dislike each other, and are funding opposing candidates, so we have some balance.
Since most of the signs are printed on materials that won’t decompose until well after George W’s great-great-granddaughter takes the oath of office, it’s a safe bet that we don’t have any “green” candidates on the city ballot.
We’re a little out of balance on the ecological issues since we managed to run that dunderhead from Phoenix out of town who threatened to sue us over our creative reconstruction of the snot-nosed slime-eared tail-wagger pinfish habitat. (Most of us don’t refer to it as “habitat.” The maps call it “The Virgin River.”)
While I have nothing but disdain and loathing for almost every variety of tree hugger, I recognize that, like the slug and the mosquito, a certain quotient of whacked environmentalists is necessary to maintain some sort of natural yin and yang in a civilization’s growth cycle.
Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of pushing and shoving regarding the locations of the signs.
One candidate got his fingers slapped for being an overachiever, erecting his signs just a few days before it was technically legal, but you can’t hate a guy for wanting to get his post-hole digging out of the way early.
Another candidate’s spouse has been whining about signs that are in violation of various homeowner association rules, threatening to sic the HOA Swat Team on the perpetrators.
Fortunately, there are so many conflicting associations that they’re having trouble figuring out who gets to conduct the first beheading.
As for individual homeowners, it’s easy to figure out which ones belong to HOAs and which ones don’t.
The free expression of a preference for a particular candidate is only permitted in neighborhoods which don’t have CC&R’s, since the American right of free speech is one of the first casualties of those who sign the loyalty oath required by most associations.
(I live in an association neighborhood, so I don’t really hate HOAs. In fact, our board is pretty good, although they still won’t allow me to post a “Martha Stewart for City Council” sign in my front yard.)
We’re still about a month away from election day, so the sign terrorists and guerilla campaigners have yet to appear.
Sign terrorists are the evildoers who sneak out in the middle of the night and tear down the signs of opposing candidates.
Guerilla campaigners are the ones who surreptitiously park their signs in front of other campaign signs.
I’m also looking forward to the one-car campaign parades, where candidates dress up their personal vehicles, pickup trucks, and ATV’s with blaring signs, plastic streamers, and endless bumper stickers then drive around town like they have somewhere important to be.
They usually leave their vehicles in conspicuous places, avoiding the city’s sign laws by claiming they’re just innocently parking their car.
(Like there’s so much business being transacted at that plot of dirt on the corner of Mesquite and Pioneer.)
As for me, I can hardly wait for the bumper sticker salvos to begin.
I consider bumper stickers to be a community service, and a vehicle maintenance tool.
I have a few spots on my car where the paint is coming off.
I have to either get the car repainted, or choose a candidate whose bumper stickers I can use to cover up the rust spots, including the scratched area in back where a “Vote for Perot” bumper sticker used to hide my close encounter with a shopping cart.
(For the record, I voted for Perot. I figured that if the guy could help me save $299 that otherwise would have gone to Earl Scheib, he could probably figure out how to beat this deficit thing.)
Now, if I could just find a way to hide that patch of dead grass on my front lawn…