Douglas Neckers: Pick pocketing made legal

I feel like my pocket has been picked by:

1. Politicians that ....

2. Are played liked banjos by media that exhibits the pol every time they burp in public.

As an academic, I recognized Newt Gingrich for what he was in 1994 — the year he led Republicans to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in four decades: Intellectually, he was the equivalent of a high school football coach who viewed every little battle as though it were a Friday night game: (Fight for the Pirates! Rah rah rah.) Throughout his career, there was nothing more important than loyalty to his brand … except maybe to himself.

As the years passed, his targets, goals (and wives) changed, but his obsession for winning stayed the same, whether what to be won was trivial or huge. Gingrich got himself fired as a history professor for perpetually running for Congress, and finally got elected on his third try in 1978. Within a decade, he was in the minority leadership, and in ’94 he rode his slogan “a contract with America” all the way to control of Congress and becoming Speaker of the House.

I remember a visit with Toledo Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur in her office the next spring. Pictures of Speaker Gingrich hung all over the House office buildings as though he were emperor. He had done what many deemed impossible.

Gingrich got greedy, though, and was, if not the first of the crazies, one of the first to really empower them. He twice shut down the government for a total of 28 days by twisting the budget button. That affected many people, including scientists like me who were on peer group review panels and had to travel. Thanks to the budget shutdown, I had to pay part of the costs for a trip my wife and I made to Washington for academic reasons. As I saw it, Newt Gingrich, smiling puss and all, picked my pocket to help cement his political power.

Speaker Gingrich’s glory didn’t last long. Less than four years after he took power, he was forced to resign after ethical violations and leading his party to a disappointing midterm election result in 1998 (sound familiar?) Today, he is little more than an occasional talking head gadfly on cable news shows.

Fast forward to 2022. The childishness of the Gingrich mentality has become totally entrenched; Gingrich himself burned out long ago, but the idiotic ideas he left behind, and the coarse way in which he treated politics, people, and especially the opposition, has become better and better cemented in place.

The practice of citizen pocket picking by the media, who continually take advantage of the politicians that have to operate as 14-year-olds cheering at the game, has become a real art — though one that is eating away like acid at the foundations of society.

Politics today requires fantastic sums of money it is said. Why? Because negative ads that everybody hates impose on us when we least expect them? Paid for by whom? Us. Get out of our lives TV networks. Frankly, I have plenty of charities that I would rather give to than Toledo Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur’s campaigns, or those of Steve Dettelbach, who ran unsuccessfully for attorney general of Ohio before being appointed director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the job he now holds. These are extraordinary public servants.

But my notion of what it means to be a good citizen obliged me to hold my nose and open my pockets and let the local political advertising agencies reach in and grab a few bucks. Very few public servants have been as good for the country as they have.

Still, it galls me that the nature of politics is that it is necessary for decent people to allow their pockets to be picked by the advertising systems, without which any major candidate is sure to lose. Good politicians of all stripes have to be embarrassed by this, and by how much of their time they have to spend raising vast sums of cash; knowing Marcy Kaptur as well as I do, I am sure she is and was.

So how do we stop, or at least, lessen, this state-sanctioned pocket picking? First, we can do what Michigan did in 2018 — adopt a statewide redistricting commission that takes the professional politicians out of deciding the boundaries; as they say in the Wolverine state, end the practice of letting politicians pick their voters and give the power to choose to the people instead. Make the politicians compete by our rules — not theirs. Shoo away the goose that’s eating our gold.

Lessening the power of the “pocket pickers” would be a glorious thing for us and democracy. We’re a lot happier (and richer); the politicians can concentrate on policy and not fundraising, and a few ad agencies will be forced to go back to selling cornflakes, and finally, and most importantly, voting once again will become a citizens’ event, not a game to see who can extort the most money for the smallest benefit from the American people.

— Douglas Neckers was an organic chemist, the McMaster distinguished professor emeritus and the founder of the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University and also a former board chair of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, N.Y

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Douglas Neckers: Pick pocketing made legal