Dear Editor:
I am nothing but exhausted and disgusted by the inane antics of the inept politicians who recently took part in the Hoboken election. It’s so easy to see why this town is gripped with political apathy and cynicism when the best it can put forth are the yammering, self-serving dolts who spent the past few months literally in my face as they loosened the drawstring on their bag of wind and let fly their various opinions and plans. All I wanted to do was simply go on with my life in this town without being confronted by their incessant harassment.
Mr. Russo set up shop two blocks away from my house, and his goons were patrolling my neighborhood like the Black Hand looking for Vito Andolini in Godfather II. He had this sad little flesh-pressing baby-kisser of a rally in front of his storefront on Washington Street.
Although the entire sidewalk was clogged and cars were double-parked up and down the block, the steadfast enforcers and auto-vultures that normally feed off the traffic of Towboken were surprisingly nowhere to be found. That blatant abuse of power is exactly the kind of tired rubbish which ended the reign of that friend of ours, and it serves him right.
But it’s not as if we found our knight in shining armor either. Dave Roberts is a selfish, bureaucratic cry-baby whose campaign was even more obnoxious than the incumbent. The relentless in-your-face tactics of Roberts and his cronies were nauseating and downright offensive. My doorway was jammed with leaflets, my mailbox was packed with slung mud and my phone was ringing with computerized phone calls from congressmen who’ve probably never been to my town telling me who I should vote for. One particular afternoon, the Roberts clan rented a trolley and drove up and down the streets of Hoboken ringing the bell and screaming over the loudspeaker. As they had traffic at a dead halt and they’re dealing with car horns and obscenities from motorists and pedestrians alike, they just smiled vacantly and waved because their cause seemed more important than that of anyone else who need to use the thoroughfare. The capper was Carol Marsh ringing my doorbell on a Saturday morning after I had worked all the previous night tending bar. I’m sure she wasn’t happy with my response to her request for a few minutes of my time.
By far, the worst day of the campaign was Election Day itself. I suppose I could gripe about the fact that I had to walk past the polling center directly across the street from my house so that I could go to the one two blocks away because that was the only place in town I could vote. But again my gripe is with the politicians themselves. Mr. Russo’s team tastelessly used known panhandlers to push leaflets on commuters.
Meanwhile Roberts had every loud-mouth with a car horn driving up and down the street just screaming at passersby. As I walked out of the PATH after a long day at work I was greeted by this screeching teenager, whose voice sounded somewhat like a violent car crash, yelling in my ear along with a group of other dazed, inarticulate half-wits – -all confronting me about whether or not I had voted that day. Each street corner on that long walk home was like a gauntlet of propaganda, up to and including the corner by the school where I was to cast my vote. As I entered the voting booth I had d