TIGHT LINES
with Andrew Spencer

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL

So another election season is come and gone, and I, for one, am glad that the air waves won't be cluttered with any more advertisements about which candidate did what to whom for how much. I've never been one for politics, despite family roots that are buried pretty deeply in political soil. I think part of my lack of enthusiasm stems from something my grandfather once told me.

"Andrew," he said - that's what he called me when he wasn't suggesting that I was a mutant because every fourth baby born in the world was Chinese and I clearly was not Chinese - "Andrew, I'm going to give you a piece of wisdom that men the world over have searched long and hard for."

I waited anxiously, hanging on his every word, sure that the secret to the meaning of life was about to be verbalized. "Andrew, I've got the secret to tell any time a politician is lying."

This was it. I was going to take my grandfather's wisdom and turn it into a gold mine. He'd kept it secret for who knew how long, but it was time that secret saw the light of day, and I was the one to bring it forth. "Andrew, you can always tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving and sound is coming out of his mouth."

He found it far funnier than I did. But it stuck with me, and I realized that, unfortunately, he was pretty much right. Politicians are notorious liars, and pretty much any time they're talking, there's a pretty good chance that at least part of what they're saying is going to be a lie.

Now, I'm sure somebody out there is suggesting that one who isn't part of the solution is simply part of the problem. Okay, fair enough. Then starting right now, I'm going to become part of the solution. I'm forming my own political party.

I'm going to call it the Fishermen's Party.

And if elected, I promise a mule for every plow and a segue for every column.

Now, friends and neighbors, as the newlyappointed Grand Poo-Bah and sole voting member of the Grand Old Order of the Fishermen's Party, I'd like to outline the reasons that I think we're the only party worth voting for.

Consider the primary (Oh, did anybody get the license plate number of that political pun?) qualification of a good politician, namely the ability to lie through his or her teeth. As outlined above, politicians make their bread-and-butter by lying, and please, somebody, find me a person who is a bigger liar - even when they're telling the truth - than an angler. I'll help you out. There isn't one.

Now, of course, politicians can't get by on just lies alone. They need opinions. Do anglers tend towards being opinionated? Um, yeah, I'll take "rhetorical questions" for two hundred, Alex. Yes, anglers are opinionated. Ask a dozen anglers where the best place to fish is - hell, ask the same bunch what color the sky is - and you'll get twelve different answers. So, to make a long story short, anglers are opinionated.

Money is the backbone of a political campaign, so you've got to make sure your "war chest" as they call it in the political arena is full of cash. And anglers kind of get a bad rap on this one, because people are under the misguided perception that people who fish have no money. Such is not the case. People who write fishing columns have no money, but that's a different story. People who actually fish are rolling in cash. I mean seriously, have you seen what these people will spend just to go out fishing for the day? Now multiply that by the number of the days in the season, and you've got . . . um . . . now lessee . . . carry the seven and multiply by nine . . . well. . . . Math was never actually my strong suit - I liked first-year algebra so much I took it twice - but let's just say you get a big number. A really big number, to be exact. Now, take that really big number, convert it to dollars and then spend it on a campaign instead of going fishing, and your financial worries are a thing of the past. And the really cool part is that, in exchange for your agreeing to be a candidate, we'll find somebody to sponsor you and pay for all your tackle. What a racket this is turning out to be!

So all we've got to do now is locate the perfect candidate. Given that we're talking politics on Nantucket, we'll have to pay a search committee to hire a consultant to enlist the services of a for-profit focus group to poll the local voters to see if they should start an exploratory investigation into whether or not there's sufficient interest for this to happen. In the meantime, I'm going fishing.

Tight lines.

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