By: Carl Reader
Newt Gingrich isn’t normally a guy who would make me pause in my channel surfing, but one day last week he did just that.
As I was cruising through the mind-jumbling bumblehead land of channels on my TV, I happened upon him and Ralph Nader on the same stage during a PBS presentation.
In most cases, it seemed to me Mr. Gingrich would be attempting a live evisceration of a consumer advocate like Mr. Nader, but in this case Mr. Nader was in rapt attention, laughing along with the rest of the audience at Mr. Gingrich’s speech. Mr. Gingrich was on a roll, and he had them rollicking through the aisles. He blathered on about how he and Mr. Nader were examples of the great way American works, describing his own poor background and how he rose above it all to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
That had me itching for the remote. The like-Abe-Lincoln-I-was-born-in-a-log-cabin speech is a staple of politicians and in most cases a lie. But then Mr. Gingrich said something that made me hesitate from zapping him off into electronic Never-Never Land.
"The thing the Founding Fathers feared most was having a dictator, so what they did was make a system so complex it had no possibility whatsoever of working," he said.
That made even Nader laugh. The idea of a confused would-be dictator scratching his head over how to master the executive branch of government, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the lower courts, the zoning hearing boards, the planning boards, the school boards, the city councils and the voters was indeed an amusing, huge problem when presented by Mr. Gingrich.
Which brings us to the point the recently defeated school referendum to repair and renovate South Hunterdon High School.
Mr. Gingrich didn’t have anything to do with the referendum, but his joke about government being too complex to work effectively might help explain why the high school’s proposal was defeated.
There were whispers that when he was Speaker of the House he was attempting a coup by scandal. With Mr. Gingrich third in line for the presidency, all he had to do was get rid of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. His method, the rumors said, was to involve Mr. Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal and Mr. Gore in the Buddhist temple imbroglio.
When both were deposed because of their respective scandals, Mr. Gingrich could be president without ever having been elected.
Simple. Smart.
Political paranoia is nearly as disgusting as the political complexities of everyday life. Both are sour pills that can help with political health as Mr. Gingrich pointed out in his joke about our government being too complex to work.
Maybe that’s why the referendum failed.
There were plenty of complexities and plenty of paranoia to go around on all fronts with the referendum.
Attempting to cover the story adequately was exhausting. To put what was in the referendum and why into a 1,000 words or so is a pretty impossible task if you want to do it right.
Listing all the proposed changes and the reasons for them is hard enough. Trying to present balanced information in an unbiased manner is daunting enough.
When the school is in disrepair, with many things wrong, it becomes more difficult. And when people decide they dislike one or more of the changes, as many voters decided the school didn’t need new office space, the whole thing can go down in flames.
Often I heard people say if new offices weren’t asked for, the referendum would have passed. The idea of offices didn’t sell among the voters.
Another common complaint I heard from several sources was this school board "was not well liked." Score one for paranoia. What does being well liked have to do with the price of beans? Does being a well-liked leader, like Jimmy Carter, prove that person to be an economic powerhouse?
The bottom line doesn’t have to be "well liked." In this case, it appears voters voted against themselves as far as spending money goes, partly because certain people weren’t "well liked."
Right now, voters appear ready to pay more in taxes over the long run if this budget passes than they would have if the referendum had passed. With the extra $500,000 in this budget, some pressing repairs will be addressed, but the big one, the roof on the school, can’t be paid for by that sum. It could cost $1 million or more sometime in the future, double the sum in this budget that would add about $140 to homeowners’ taxes for one year.
The voters will be responsible for that million dollars in the future. Many on fixed income decided they just couldn’t pay, and who can blame them? The kids who feel they’re getting shortchanged will.
Things got so complex with the referendum that at times school board members had to go to the rule books to find out what they could or could not do with different aspects of it. State policy had to be followed on each iota of the referendum, and when writing about the referendum, each of those issues had to be found out about and explained.
Architects, planners, the bond counsel, state authorities and local authorities had to make sure each step they took was the legal one.
Putting it into words wasn’t easy. Making it as clear as possible took work. Nobody yet has the whole picture.
The voters voted, so that part is done with. Voters are not gods, and those personal dislikes, lack of belief in what was being told to them and pure personal self-interest all came into play.
Maybe the board didn’t sell the referendum well enough. Maybe the newspapers didn’t do a good enough job of detailing it.
Everybody made mistakes. Things were so complicated they couldn’t be avoided.
But then again, maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
If chaos rules, then Caesar can’t.
