I guess you could call it a fundamental lack of respect. Not for me, mind you, but for the voters of Chester County.

I was delighted to spend a half hour on the air with Mike Pincus of WCHE the other day — as will be the case with my running mates Kipp Stone and Jim Reilly over the next couple of Wednesdays. The Republicans? Suddenly, they have scheduling conflicts.

Scheduling conflicts? Why not claim that they had to wash their hair? I mean, come on. While there’s been some suggestion that the Chester County GOP is mad because some at WCHE have been critical of Chester County’s own would-be Lt. Governor, Carol Aichele. I’m skeptical myself.

I think it has a lot more to do with the same reason my opponent doesn’t have his own Web site: the GOP apparently thinks the less you know about him — or any of their candidates — the more likely you’ll be to vote for them. That’s along the same lines as the sudden disappearance of the Chester County ACTION Website — only for it to be replaced by a sanitized, less scary version (thanks to Wayback Machine, however, the original scary content is saved for all to see ).

As a candidate for office, there’s an obligation to the people to share your thoughts and explain why you’re the most qualified for the job. It’s a job interview, done over and over again, sometimes one person at a time, and others, through the media, in front of a larger audience.

Unfortunately, this new breed of GOP candidate — as well as the party leadership –seems to see this as a coronation and believes that they have no responsibility to the voters, who might as well be told to “let them eat cake.”

That’s starkly different from what the four of us running on the Democratic slate believe.

We fundamentally believe in as much transparency and sunshine as possible — both in our campaigns and in running county government. We are fighting for a return of county government of the people, for the people, by the people, and they’re fighting to keep it in the hands of a few wealthy, powerful special interests who profit from decisions that cost you and me — taxpayers — millions of dollars a year.

We understand accountability — we’ve all run businesses. In my case, I literally had hundreds of thousands of readers to answer to, not to mention advertisers and retailers. I had to balance the needs of all — and look to the long-term in making decisions, not just running for the quick buck, or always caving in to what the easy — but wrong — choice might be.

They don’t.

Thankfully, we have a chance to do something about it on Nov. 3.

* * *

So the National Rifle Association calls me up the other day. It seems they want to tell me about how the United Nations and Hillary Clinton want to take my handgun away.

A nearly screaming, mostly ranting recording of NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre (although I could swear that he’s identified as the organization’s president) plays for a couple of minutes before a live operator comes back on the line to ask me my opinion.

I, of course, have looked up the issue on the Internet and found it to be completely fake. So, mostly, I just laugh at the person and suggest, maybe, just maybe, that there really could be better things to do with their time and money.

Hey, don’t get me wrong: the NRA has every right to advocate for gun rights. I think we need to look, honestly and fairly at the balance between Second Amendment rights and the dozens of people shot monthly in cities like Philadelphia.

On the off chance that this entire thing is fake — that some left-wing organization is pulling an Abbie Hoffman and making these calls to make the NRA look bad, I want to make clear that there are some smart, sober groups on the right, who many times make valid points when we to the left of center overreach. The back and forth of two-party government is a healthy adversarial relationship and it’s crucial to good government.

But…we’re not really seeing a lot of that of late. What we’re seeing of late are things like Sarah Palin’s Death Panels, and the pathetic gibberish of Glenn Beck. A lot of shrill, loud lies, like this UN/Hillary Clinton fiction from the NRA. The lunatic right-wing fringe seems to have taken over, and an awful lot of us, left and right, Democrats and Republicans, are pretty concerned.

I wish, for one second, that the people spouting these lies believed in them. But they don’t — it’s a cynical manipulation of voters, intended to make you angry. Like it or not, these NRA calls are basically a campaign to make people mad so they’ll come out and vote against people like me, if only because I happen to be in the same political party as Hillary Clinton. Since they can’t make the case on the merits of the facts, they have to trump up some emotional, fictional case.

Folks, it’s an insult. They must really think you’re pretty gullible and they must be scared to be trying something like this. They must know that eventually, the truth will come out, it always does, and you folks will be pretty angry. But I guess, like their big-money contributors who caused the current financial crisis, they seem to be only worried about short-term success and not really about the consequences over the long haul.

You deserve better and you should demand it.