Getting Political

Jennifer Zurko

When I told people I was working on an article about politics, they all had the same reaction: Their eyes widened, they let out a breath and said, “Oh boy.”

Yes, I decided to tackle the topic of the year. A topic that’s split up families, made you unfollow good friends on Facebook and forced you to keep conversations focused on music and/or the weather (everything else seems to swing back to politics).

But it’s not what you would expect—at least I hope so. I wanted to look at the election and the current ultra-partisan state of our government and how it affects our industry. I was originally going to do a comparison of the Democratic and Republican platforms that came out right before the conventions. I thought it would be interesting to look at how both sides see immigration reform, health care, minimum wage and other issues that directly impact growers and retailers. I poured over all 80-plus pages of both platforms and realized it wasn’t going to work.

First, I would have needed three more pages just for that. Secondly, in the grand scheme of things, what the parties say in the platforms doesn’t matter; it’s what the candidates actually do and say on the campaign trail and when they’re in office that matters. Craig Regelbrugge, AmericanHort’s Director of Government Relations and one of my sources for the article, said that the platforms are just a “moment in time” and that they’re usually forgotten shortly after the conventions. (If you’re dying to read them, it’s an easy Google search.)

So, as with a lot of my articles, the one that you see wasn’t my original plan, but I think it turned out better.

I told Craig when I saw him at Cultivate that I wanted to write about the election and he helped me realize that in order to write about the recent bout of gridlock and bickering, I’d have to understand how it got to be so bad. When I read Jonathan Rauch’s article from The Atlantic called “How American Politics Went Insane,” I knew that I would better serve you by sharing what I learned. He writes a fascinating essay on how politics is like the immune system of the human body and explains how and why it got so “sick.” It’s extremely telling and eye opening.   

Also, we see all of the election shenanigans on TV and read about it online (if you get your news from Facebook or other social media, you need to check yourself, as rapper Ice Cube would say)—the people from SAF and American-Hort who represent our industry are smack-dab in the middle of all that. I wanted to ask Craig and SAF’s Drew Gruenburg how they’ve managed to support their grower members amidst a volatile political climate, which they told me is the worst they’ve ever seen. It’s nice to know that our industry organizations are still diligently working toward legislation that will help green businesses while staying non-partisan. Craig told me that even though he’s a lobbyist, he’s a horticulturist first and foremost. In a room full of lobbyists, there are few that can say they don’t support a specific political party. We should be proud of that.

The point of this month’s cover story is not to tell you who to vote for, but to educate and inform you, and to keep you engaged on what’s going on in Washington. Regardless of how tiresome our nation’s politics are and how batty this election cycle has been, we need to make sure we stay focused and keep our eyes on the ball. Thankfully, we have organizations that help us do that. GT