My mom’s an elected state representative from southern Oregon. The flier she held in her hand had arrived in her mailbox just that morning. It was a so-called hit piece put out by her opponent. Ugly in tone, it painted several of Mom’s votes as being anti-education. The most inflammatory part of the piece cited no source and read: “After Judy Uherbelau’s four years in Salem, kids face more danger from drugs and violence in school than ever.”

To you voters out there who have seen much worse in your own mailbox, a charge like this may strike you as tame. To an exhausted candidate who lives in a small town of 19,000, however, it can be devastating. Who wants to walk into the local grocery store or library and wonder, “Do people here believe those awful things about me? Do they believe that my service in the Oregon Legislature has been harmful to kids?”

To make matters worse, days earlier Mom’s opponent had said in a television interview, “Judy seems to care more about lawsuits than compassion.” Considering my mother’s background, this statement was almost comical. Mom spent 15 years as a registered nurse, including four as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Mariana Islands. In southern Oregon, she started a theater program in nursing homes, helped develop the county’s first AIDS task force and established a teen-health clinic at our local high school. But not all voters were aware of Mom’s history–a fact her opponent was banking on.

The sound bite referred to a vote on a Good Samaritan bill which would have exempted lay persons who aid accident victims from legal prosecution, unless they were proved grossly negligent. While Oregon law already covered those with medical training, the 1997 Oregon House of Representatives considered exempting everyone, whether they had training or not. Mom was the only representative to vote against it. Her reason: as a registered nurse, she had seen patients suffer irreversible spinal injuries from being improperly moved following an accident. While she agreed that everyone should be encouraged to stop and comfort an accident victim (as well as call for the appropriate emergency assistance), she didn’t believe untrained people should attempt to administer medical care. Mom’s opponent tried to turn this conscientious vote into a callous one.

Some may say that being Judy’s daughter makes me unable to judge fairly any challenge to her ability as a legislator. I expect her opponent to take issue with her legislative record in order to point out clear differences between them. What I object to is having her record distorted to fit a sound bite or her entire life history twisted into a catch phrase.

When a race occurs on the national or even state level, we voters tend to depersonalize it. From such a distance, the candidates seem more like actors than flesh and blood. Campaigns take on epic proportions, with each contender trying to paint himself or herself as Moses and the opponent as Pharaoh.

While such dramatization may stir voters enough to get them to cast ballots in presidential and statewide races, it can do more harm than good on the local level. Who wants to run for an often-unpaid, unglamorous seat on the city council when there’s always that hit piece or dark sound bite waiting in the wings? After a while, people subconsciously slam the door on the idea of entering public service themselves.

It’s tempting to throw up our hands and say “Politics is a dirty business,” but I think that we Americans have more influence over campaigns than we know. In Mom’s case, the tide began to turn when many supporters wrote letters to the newspapers condemning negative tactics and pointing out Mom’s strengths as a legislator. A local group of voters organized a protest, calling on her opponent to run a clean campaign. In endorsing Mom, all the local papers called attention to her opponent’s willingness to distort her record.

I must confess that when I saw my mother so discouraged five months ago, my first instinct was to see what dirt we could dig up on her opponent. Mom was much wiser than I and chose to finish the race the way she began it: cleanly. Voters responded by giving her a 12 percentage-point victory, the largest margin the seat had seen in something like 20 years.

Due to term limits, the 1999 Oregon legislative session will be Mom’s last. Her opponent, however, is expected to run again in the year 2000. I hope that both she, and whoever runs against her, will choose to run a clean and accurate campaign. We Americans face too many critical issues for our candidates to spend their time–and ours–on much less.