#1130 Initiatoor

I was thinking about initiatives and Tim Eyman the other day. And my conclusion was that Tim Eyman is like the Ronco of Politics. Like every Ronco product you ever saw hawked on television, Tim’s offerings are just too good to be true.
It’s too bad his first initiative passed. Oh sure, my car license fees went down. But it’s pretty obvious by the state of most of the state’s roads that there was a price.
Like the supposedly never-need-sharpening blades of a set of Ronco ginsu knives, running a government without any taxes at all is a pipe dream. Who would volunteer?
I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to not pay taxes. I’m the world’s original skinflint, and I hate waste. But I also know that legislation is impossible with initiatives. Reality is too complex. Tim’s approach is to suck in the gullible public with a sharp catchy concept, then use that ax to chop through an apparent bureaucratic Gordian knot. Unfortunately, that knot is composed of the intermeshing arteries of government. And now we got blood spurting everywhere.
So I wonder what got Tim on the path to being a professional initiatoor. Because, you know, he makes a living, and a good one, at mounting these initiative drives. The funny thing is, he hardly ever wins. If he were a legitimate business, depending on the success of a regular product, he’d be out of business by now.
My other question is, if he’s such a good independent lawmaker, why hasn’t he ever won an election? For the same reason you’d never see Rush Limbaugh elected to anything. Sniping gadflies always garner a lot of attention, much like annoying mosquitoes, but in the end they can only suck a tiny amount of blood.
So Tim may be able to send his Gordian tax-knot cutters statewide and collect enough disaffected and undiscerning voters. But he’d never be able to get enough votes in his own district to get elected.
Here’s an idea, let’s create a statewide lawmaker position specifically for the susceptible disaffected. Tim would have a voice, and we’d get him off the streets.
Hey Tim, if you write that initiative, I’ll sign it.
America, ya gotta love it.