ROUND POND, Maine -- At noon on the Fourth of July, I find myself sitting a little grassy embankment along Lower Round Pond Road with two 4-year-olds using my stomach as a trampoline. The sky is a stark, cloudless blue. The temperature is an almost criminally mild 75 degrees, and the smell of the sea slips in and out of my consciousness, alternating with questions about what for lunch. Washington slips further and further away. “So this,” I think, “is America.” No one is obsessing about who will replace Sandra Day O'Connor, and even fewer are thinking about whether Dick Durbin should have apologized sooner or not at all. At one point, I sneak away to look at the protected harbor that looks like a postcard. I end up eating a crab roll that is so good I wonder why hot dogs won the contest to be traditional holiday food on July 4. A hint, of course, is that the crab roll costs $8.95.
But soon there will be a parade with fire trucks and flags and fancied-up riding mowers that will underscore that God does, indeed, shed his grace on us from sea to shining sea. I am sitting with one woman who describes herself as a committed atheist; the night before, the woman went to church so she could sing.
Washington, with its crazy partisan politics, seems like another planet.
But I should have known this would not last when I ran into a former U.S. representative from Texas, Charlie Stenholm, standing beside the road with his wife, waiting for the parade. Stenholm is a poignant reminder of what has happened to American politics, and particularly Democrats, in recent years. He served 26 years in the House before Tom DeLay redistricted him -- and four other Democrats in Texas -- out of their seats in 2004. And one other Texas Democrat thought it better to switch to the GOP if he wanted to survive. A conservative from a conservative district, Stenholm lost not because he wasn't conservative but because he wasn't Republican. He is anti-abortion. He voted for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. He was talking about balancing the federal budget in the 1980s before it was a fad. He was one of the fiercest advocates for the cattle ranchers, cotton growers, and oil riggers of his district west of Dallas. And still, none of that could save him last year from the DeLay machine, which squeezed him into a new, heavily GOP-leaning district and forced him to run against a sitting GOP freshman, Randy Neugebauer, on a ballot topped by George W. Bush. Stenholm lost 58 percent to 40 percent. Last week Stenholm thought he, too, had escaped Washington, until we started talking.
We were wrong. Partly because the Round Pond Fourth of July Parade is raucously funny and notoriously political. “[T]he real standout of these parades is their unabashed skewering of both local and national politicians and politics,” writes Elizabeth Peavey,” in the current issue of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, a regional magazine, “Recent floats have featured such themes as the Bush–bin Laden family reunion.”
Participants have been known to throw live bait instead of candy to kids along the parade route. A perennial favorite is the Tacky Tourists, a groups armed with sunscreen and beach chairs that performs a dance routine that looks like a military changing of the guard, except for the folding chairs in place of the rifles. And last year, I am told, one entry featured a casket with Ronald Reagan waving goodbye. This week, a couple worked in tandem. He carried a cane; she wore a blonde wig. Her sign proclaimed: “The Blonde leading the Blind.” His placard, on one side, read: Don't be too hard-on us.” The other side read: “Viagra victim.”
There was, of course, a shirtless man wearing a George W. Bush mask, carrying a 9-11 sign, suggesting that the emperor wore no clothes. A lot more people had signs that said “Support The Troops.”
But proving that all politics are, indeed, local, there was the liquefied natural gas float: A huge truck trailing a complicated contraption, including a huge porta potty, with people sitting on the head, pants at their ankles. The signs lamented that Maine residents may soon no longer be able to stop the location of liquefied natural gas facilities in their state, where battle over such sitings have been raging in recent years.
Just before the Independence Day recess, the U.S. Senate rejected efforts by some senators, including Maine's Olympia Snowe, to give governors veto power over where those facilities can be located.
“We're not talking about the siting of a neighborhood ballpark or a Wal-Mart," Snowe said. "It's a states rights issue, plain and simple."
Suddenly the parade was had entered the debate of the energy independence that has characterized the fights over the just-passed energy bill.
On May 20, Snowe, a Republican, and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to give states the right to control if and where liquefied natural gas facilities can be built or expanded. A month later, the Senate rejected their amendment to the energy bill 52-45, giving federal regulators the final say in the matter. The Senate finally passed the energy bill 85-12; next week, it is expected to name conferees to work out differences with the House. The Senate package includes a $14 billion tax package aimed and cutting U.S. dependence on foreign oil and encouraging production and use of renewable energy sources like solar and wind. The House has set aside only $8 billion incentives that go mostly to fossil fuel and nuclear production sources. The House bill also includes provisions for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and a liability deal for manufacturers of on MTBE, the gas additive implicated in water contamination all across the country. Suddenly the parade is not so funny, and Washington's doings are as ubiquitous as ever.There is a man coming down the street pushing a baby stroller with a flagpole attached. A full-sized American flag is flying in the breeze. I am ready to laugh. Somehow, he looks like he's going to have a one-liner written on a placard -- like many of the others in the parade.
Instead, I read a note that says something like this: My baby girl is 20. She is a Marine stationed in Iraq. Support our troops. Even with kids jumping up and down all over me, the sign gets me right in the stomach.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
