By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – Mike Braun and Joe Donnelly just played a fun little game of tit for tat.

Braun, the Republican challenger for Indiana’s U.S. Senate seat, kicked things off. His campaign argued that Donnelly, the Democratic incumbent, had violated campaign laws. Donnelly’s staff had posted a short video of him meeting with President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Braun’s campaign said the video could be used for political purposes and therefore was a no-no.

A few days passed. Then Donnelly’s camp responded in kind. Braun had recorded a six-figure personal loan from the candidate to his campaign in an improper fashion, the Donnelly team asserted. It was a violation of campaign finance laws and should be punished, they said.

In both cases, denials were issued.

Staffers and surrogates for both candidates took turns calling the other guy names.

A grand time was had by all.

What did any of this have to do with the lives of hard-working Hoosiers, otherwise known as the folks Donnelly and Braun are supposed to serve?

Zip.

Nada.

Nothing.

I have as much tolerance for campaign tomfoolery as anyone. There’s a long American tradition of gamesmanship and jockeying that makes our political contests lively.

But I also believe public servants ought to devote at least some of their time and energy when they run for office to thinking about what the people they’re supposed to serve might need.

What we’re hearing from Braun and Donnelly, though, is a lot of noise about which one of them outsourced more jobs in his business career and which is the most committed to building an expensive, unnecessary and non-productive wall along this nation’s southern border.

Meanwhile, we in Indiana are seeing something not seen before.

Employment figures in the state are robust – we’re close if not at the percentage that economists consider full employment – but the number of Hoosiers who have fallen into poverty also has increased. Just as bad, the bottom of the Indiana middle-class seems to be disappearing.

By some measures, nearly half the people in this state are in or are only one relatively mild misstep or problem away from sliding toward financial disaster and seeing the lives and lifestyles they’ve worked hard to build vanish like smoke in a stiff breeze.

History and conventional wisdom always have dictated that jobs are the antidote to poverty.

But the old rules don’t seem to apply now.

And the old bromides – skill up, get more training, pull yourself up by your bootstraps – seem emptier than ever.

Telling a Hoosier working mother or father who’s already laboring 60 or 70 hours a week at two or three different jobs just to keep the family housed and fed that she or he needs to find still more time to get additional training or schooling is to engage in duplicitous fantasy.

Both Joe Donnelly and Mike Braun like to tout their regular-guy, blue-collar credentials. They want us to believe that they understand the problems facing all those Hoosiers who tiptoe along the edge of the cliff overlooking economic and human disaster.

Or who already have taken the fall – and keep falling.

Maybe Braun and Donnelly do understand that.

The best way to demonstrate that they do is to start talking more about the challenges Hoosiers face and less about the gotcha games they seem determined to play with each other.

I know we’re trapped in an era in which the rules, such as they are, of reality television shows dominate our political discussions.

But reality TV shows are designed to entertain and distract.

What’s happening to too many Hoosiers is real and cannot be ignored.

For those Hoosiers, life isn’t a game.

It’s deadly serious business.

It would be nice if they had a senator in Washington who understands that.

Footnote: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.