The blizzard of election campaign fliers will be over by the time you read these words.
And, frankly, I'm going to miss them.
After this week's primary election, my mail will go back to the boring days of bills, replacement window ads, and letters offering me a free dinner if I'll listen to a spiel about hearing aids or prepaid funeral plans.
All the fun will go out of getting the mail.
Everyone needs a hobby, especially in retirement, so I have saved every campaign flier that has arrived. (My wife keeps asking if she can throw them away yet, but I've grown kind of attached to them.)
We had received 86 fliers from 14 different candidates as of Friday, all from Republicans.
Of those 86 fliers, 26 were from Steve Friess, who is running for Wyoming's lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. A year ago I couldn't have picked Steve Friess out of a police lineup. Today, thanks to his flurry of fliers, I feel like Steve and I are best buds.
If he wins the nomination this week, it will prove you can go from unrecognized to a member of the family, largely through junk mail. The beleaguered print industry can probably use the help.
Trailing Friess is opponent Chuck Gray with nine fliers. Harriet Hageman, running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, has sent seven. Then there's a long list of candidates who have sent one or two.
The recurring themes of most of these fliers are, “I hate big government and promise to tell those parasites in Washington how we do things in Wyoming,” and “I'm a lot more conservative than the slow dogs I'm running against.” And, “I'll UNLEASH energy,” “our way of life here in Wyoming is swell,” and “I swear on my mother's grave that I'll never, ever, ever raise taxes.”
They're all for guns, jobs, education, secure borders and the unborn. And they'll all fight like a tourist-enraged Yellowstone buffalo, if we'll just vote for them.
The good news is that of the 86 fliers, 72 were largely positive statements about what they would like to accomplish, accompanied by pictures of themselves in front of mountains, shooting guns, or hanging out with cowboys in big hats, miners in hard hats, or coffee group oldsters chewing the fat at some small-town cafe.
By far the most photographs are of President Donald Trump. His picture is featured in 31 of the fliers, sometimes alongside the grinning candidate, who vows to “stand by Trump” come hell, high water, pestilence or plagues of frogs or locusts. The fact that Wyoming has voted for Trump by over 70 percent in three presidential elections is not lost on these quick studies.
Big cowboy hats appear in 22 fliers. (Many of the hats are in Steve Friess fliers, but we still have not seen the candidate himself in a cowboy hat, no doubt because of his impressive head of hair. He could be on TV.)
Of the 86 fliers, only 14 were negative, but they're doozies. Some faceless committee based in Miami sent a flier calling Friess a “Jackson elitist,” showing him in a tuxedo, smoking a cigar, cocktail in hand. Another showed Freiess astride the family's private jet.
According to some political action group in Jackson, gubernatorial hopeful Eric Barlow once voted to raise taxes on lodging and fuel, and voted to send “your hard-earned dollars” to illegal immigrants.
Chuck Gray is a lightning rod for negative fliers, with eight arriving so far. While one opponent calls him “China Chuck,” two campaign groups up the ante, calling him a CALIFORNIAN! (They really know how to hurt a guy.)
Gray has sent out two fliers featuring old fat guys playing girls sports, their corpulent bellies exposed.
There are even photographs of Liz Cheney and Hillary Clinton in my stack of fliers, the senders promising to not to be anything like those two. No way.
As I write this, there are still three more mail deliveries before Tuesday night, so things could get a lot more wild and woolly in the final stretch.
And then it's all over Wednesday.
And we're back to the prepaid funeral-plan fliers.
Dave Simpson can be contacted at DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
