By PETE KENNEDY - Freeman Staff, Waukesha Freeman November 8, 2002

Covering elections is a little like final exams. It means a loss of sleep and a lot of cramming.
Some of my colleagues love elections, and none more so than Dennis Shook. Just about every day Dennis hammers at a keyboard a few desks away from me. The guy writes faster than Stephen King, and he mostly reports on politics.

Dennis likes being part of the process, in large part because he believes in government. He thinks government can, and often does, improve our lives. So for Dennis, covering an election is like sending a sports lover to write about the Super Bowl.

I like sports more than politics, though I don't believe in either one too much these days. Watching an NFL game is like an infomercial with an emotional attachment. It's all about athletes dancing after four-yard gains or losses. The dances draw attention, and attention leads to bigger contracts.

Politics, meanwhile, is corrupt. These guys take huge amounts of money from political action committees. They represent you and I only if we give to the PAC or happen to have the same agenda as the folks who bought their loyalty.

That made deciding between Jim Doyle and Scott McCallum a tough choice - and not because I like them both so much. Doyle took thousands from unions, McCallum thousands from roadbuilders. Neither group has my best interests at heart.

And neither guy stood up and really said what he believed in. The election was all about dragging the other guy down. Unlike some voters, I believe there is a place for that. Poor decisions should be pointed out. But ad campaigns built around jet rides and bingo games get a little old. Didn't one of the candidates have something better to talk about?

The answer is yes, but of course they won't talk straight. If they do, they lose - or so the theory goes. Remember the days when a candidate told you how he or she stood on an issue and you made a choice based on that information?

Well, I found myself longing for those days when I went to vote on Tuesday. So I asked myself who took a stand and told voters their plan.

The answer was Ed Thompson, the Libertarian candidate, and Jim Young, the Green Party candidate. Ed wants to downsize government and reform the political process. Jim Young actually proposed a tax hike to pay for more government programs.

I can't say I'm for a tax hike, so Jim Young should have been eliminated. But there is another factor in Jim's favor: He grew up across the street from me and I like him.

Jim was a great athlete when we were kids. He also is four years older, which limited the contact between us. But he still came out and threw the ball around with his younger brothers and me. And despite having plenty of reasons for being a stuck-up guy, Jim wasn't. He always went out of his way to be nice to the neighborhood kids.

Then he got older, graduated from Catholic Memorial High School - one of the most conservative schools in one of the state's most conservative counties - and somehow ended up to the left of George McGovern.

Do I agree with those beliefs? Some yes, some no. Still, on Tuesday I went into the booth with the little pencil and completed Jim Young's arrow. Voting for a guy because he was nice to you as a kid might not make a whole lot of sense. But voting against a guy because of an airplane ride or a bingo game doesn't seem all that enlightened, either.

I don't believe in all of Jim's philosophies, but I do believe he is a man of principle. If only we could say the same thing about the candidates without the ponytails.

Pete Kennedy can be reached at pkennedy@conleynet.com.
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