Is a defense attorney running for Congress evil because he enables accused criminals to secure the kind of due process of law that is prescribed in our Constitution? Of course not. Does his opponent really want to throw 12-year-old girls, their parents and their doctors into prison for the rest of their lives because they don’t want to bear the child of a rapist? Not likely.
However, such are the kinds of allegations that have been flooding the airwaves as political campaigns have heated up in recent weeks. Usually, disclaimers at the end reveal they are created, and paid for, by third-party entities that aren’t necessarily affiliated with the candidates.
Welcome to the political big leagues, where campaigns resort to levels of nastiness and virulence that previously haven’t been common in the Rio GrandeValley.
Talk, and complaints, of such political attack ads have been heard for years, but the current fare that’s littering our televisions, social media pages and radio programming is largely new to South Texas. This is largely because the region previously hadn’t attracted much national attention.
The Valley has long been a Democratic Party stronghold. As a result, the Republican Party has generally conceded the area and made little effort to seek strong candidates or support those who chose to file for election as Republicans — if anyone did at all. Over the years many Democrats have run unopposed for key seats in Congress, the state legislature and even local races.
Loyalty to the Democratic Party, however, has waned in recent years; some say it’s because the party has largely assumed it held our hearts, and made little effort to repay that loyalty with legislation that could have brought improved infrastructure, higher education and other services to the region sooner. Others cite the party’s apparent lurch to the left, which clashes with Valley values that are more moderate to conservative than Democrats in other parts of the country.
Growing support for GOP officials — first, perhaps, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, then George W. Bush and most recently Donald Trump — convinced the party that the Valley was worth fighting for, and declared its intent to do so.
That fight has brought the kind of tactics that many people have heard about but might not have seen firsthand.
To be sure, we have seen attacks before. We have received many defamatory communications, usually anonymous, that arrived too late to adequately verify before Election Day, if at all. Most likely, if those allegations had merit the accusers probably wouldn’t have waited until the last minute to make them.
We trust that most voters will see through the alarmist rhetoric, and know that Valley residents who think differently haven’t suddenly become the devil incarnate. Those differences might be significant enough to affect our election decisions. Once the votes are counted, however, both winners and losers will continue to be our neighbors, with assets that can benefit our community whether they are in or out of office.
