Voters, beware of misleading messages

Vote your (blank).

That’s the catchphrase for this year’s elections.

Money magazine has a story promoted as “Vote your wallet.”

Outside magazine features a Patagonia ad urging readers to “Vote your environment.”

The National Shooting Sports Foundation is telling sportsmen to “Vote your sport,” which might not be so bad if it were more than just a thinly veiled variation of the National Rifle Association mantra to “Vote your gun.”

What ever happened to the concept of “Vote your conscience?”

The pressure on sportsmen to vote their sport is particularly troubling since it’s strayed from the big picture of fish, wildlife and habitat conservation to the narrow premise that a candidate is viable only if he has an unblemished record of opposing gun control.

This narrow approach to voting in 1994 helped unseat former Speaker of the House Tom Foley, the last major Washington candidate, I believe, to pose in a duck blind with a shotgun for statewide campaign ads.

Sportsmen are distinguished for being politically savvy, but they got snookered in that election.

Two of the major charges against Washington’s most influential politician at the time were his support for the ban on assault weapons and his 15-terms in Congress.

The National Rifle Association put its muscle behind challenger George Nethercutt and so did U.S. Term Limits, the Washington, D.C., group that came back in 1999 and spent about $70,000 asking Nethercutt to keep his promise and not run again.

But Nethercutt thumbed his nose at them, exposing his term-limits platform as a hoax.

More recently, the NRA also was exposed as anything but straight-shooters in that campaign. NRA officials didn’t so much as fire a volley of dismay when their darling, President George W. Bush, declared he would sign the assault weapons ban — regardless of its effectiveness — if it had been extended.

Instead, they joined Vice President Dick Cheney in launching a barrage of attacks on Sen. John Kerry for buying a new camo jacket and going goose hunting.

Sure it was a photo op. Everything these candidates do is for publicity, including landing in a jet on an aircraft carrier.

If last week’s outing had been Kerry’s first hunting trip, the NRA would have had some live ammunition. But the senator has been hunting since he was 12 or 13. He has roots in the sport.

He knows the difference between a semi-automatic goose gun and the guns of mass destruction opposed by police chiefs across the nation.

The most egregious flip-flop in this campaign is the gun lobby championing firearms and the military while blasting a Purple Heart recipient, hunter and gun owner who’s used a firearm to kill the enemy in defense of his fellow soldiers.

Sportsmen must look beyond the shameless NRA to their consciences. Here’s a good place to start:

Is there a sportsman’s distinction between a senator who sneaks a few hours out of a grueling campaign to sit in a pit for a shot at a goose and a vice president who’s recent hunting exploits include blasting 70 pen-raised pheasants released at a hunting preserve while he sat on his butt in a blind?

The NRA said it’s campaigning for hunters when it supports Bush’s plan to reverse the Clinton roadless area protections for national forests.

But that’s a divisive argument that proves the NRA is out of touch with hunting. While some sportsmen want to drive everywhere, others realize that game populations would be ravaged and hunting seasons would be shorter and more restrictive if vehicles could follow wildlife wherever they go.

Safari Club International and the NSSF are among special interest groups smearing Kerry because he’s been endorsed by the Humane Society of the United States.

Granted, HSUS is a generally deplorable group that extracts donations for propaganda from well-wishers, many of whom think they are helping the similarly named but unassociated local animal shelters. But the Sportsmen’s and Animal Owners’ Voting Alliance, which is tracking politicians supported by animal rights fanatics, recently reported that its job was more complicated than expected after finding numerous NRA-backed candidates, Republicans and Democrats, that had been endorsed by HSUS.

These mixed messages and hidden agendas illustrate why many sportsmen’s interests are suggesting that hunters and anglers expand their universe and vote smarter.

Fly-fishing magazines are suggesting that anglers should not let international affairs distract them from the Bush administration’s setbacks to land-use policies that protect wildlife areas and headwaters for great fishing waters.

Fishing magazines also are pointing out that while the Bush administration has been weakening anti-pollution laws, the EPA has announced that one out of every four rivers and lakes in the United States is contaminated with mercury and other pollutants that could cause health problems for children and pregnant women who eat fish.

I guess the spin is that the president is a proponent of catch-and-release fishing.

The worst-case scenario is a pigeonholed America where groups of a feather insulate themselves from new information and fresh opinions by locking into Web sites and talk shows that provide little more than a daily drumbeat of attack and divide.

Hiking in British Columbia last month, I met a Dutch businessman who echoed the sentiment I’ve heard from dozens of foreigners I’ve met in the past two years. They view our leaders with the same contempt and distrust that Americans felt when we saw news clips of Brezhnev in Red Square.

That stone-cold, no-compromise NRA-type image makes me think about stories in the news recently, such as the importance of foreign markets for our beef and grain industries.

These are issues bigger than the gun lobby.

“You realize,” the Dutchman said as we split after several glorious days of autumn hiking, “the whole world is waiting to see what you do in November.”

Field & Stream magazine has departed from its blind “Vote your sport” advocacy of the 2000 election. Bush and Kerry are both featured on the magazine’s October cover. Interviews inside let each candidate state his case for the sportsman’s vote on issues such as gun rights, conservation and the environment.

Both candidates hunt and fish. But while Sen. Kerry stressed the need for environmental protection, President Bush emphasized the importance of using resources and preparing for the country’s unrestrained appetite for consumption.

So go, sportsmen. Study up, and “Vote your future.”