That's Entertainment: The Also-Rans' Straight Talk

Ask Donna Edwards a question, and the candidate for Congress tells a personal story about how she struggled without health insurance, helped her son get help overcoming learning disabilities or nearly lost her house to foreclosure.

"Whenever there's a complex issue, Miss Edwards has two tactics," complains her target in Tuesday's Democratic primary, Al Wynn, the eight-term congressman who represents Prince George's and Montgomery counties. "She shows her pain -- 'I've been foreclosed on, too' -- and then she says, 'Let's find a way to attack Al Wynn.' "

To which Edwards replies, "I don't think it's so bad to have politicians who understand people's lives."

And on they go, sniping into the night. In Maryland's 4th Congressional District, the rematch between Rep. Wynn, whose scowling, impatient demeanor says he thinks he has better things to do than persuade voters to keep him in office, and challenger Edwards, who came within three percentage points of ousting Wynn two years ago, is a big draw.

Whatever the reason -- the Iraq war, the economy, the TV writers' strike -- it's standing room only at an Edwards-Wynn debate at Prince George's Community College in Largo. But the gales of laughter pouring out of the auditorium have nothing to do with the two main contenders. It's the other candidates, four more Democrats and three Republicans, who have the audience laughing both at and with them.

Ask the two top contenders about illegal immigration, and you know their answers before they open their mouths. Secure the borders, create a path to legal status, the usual stuff.

Now listen to the also-rans, the guys who ponied up $100 to get on the ballot because they have something to say.

"Lock all the governors and senators in a room, and don't let them out till they reach a fair solution," says George McDermott, a Prince George's businessman who lists his education as "the school of hard knocks."

"If we had 8 million Canadians coming in, nobody would say a word," says Upper Marlboro real estate broker George Mitchell. "So let's tell it like it is: It's racism, and we need to stop it."

"I'm one-eighth Cherokee," says candidate Peter James, a Republican from Germantown who invented a robotic lawnmower. "As far as I'm concerned, you're all illegals."

In this era of personalized politics, in which everyone with access to a computer can post his own manifesto, voters have returned to the coarseness and cacophony of our revolutionary roots, a time of roiling partisan battles and rambunctious rhetoric.

At the presidential level, candidates stick inside a very narrow rhetorical range. Some of them speak in a more confessional style than, say, Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson ever did. For the most part, though, they either speak in an insider patter that is incomprehensible to most civilians, or they hide behind oversimplified blather that treats voters like morons.