Mixed emotions

The campaign is over.

The votes are in.

My candidate lost by about 4% or so and it wasn't a pretty sight. I am very concerned about who will be running the City now but I also am waiting to see whether the new Mayor offers an open hand or a closed fist. I don't know what to expect except that the same "forces" that have been running the City for 30 years will still have control over the major policy initiative for the next two years.

The most important thing to realize is that I've got to play the hand I've been dealt. To get the absolute best public policy I can out of this under any circumstance.

I met this morning with a friend who was on the opposite side of one of the two referendum issues that was decided on election day. ("My" side prevailed on both...more on that later) and we started working on finding common ground on how to implement the initiative without any further internecine warfare. We met for two hours and did three "flow charts" to determine just where conflicts could occur and how to avoid/resolve those conflicts before they erupted in a damaging floor fight. All-in-all, I'm pretty pleased with what we came up with but now I have to sell it to my colleagues.....no easy task...

The two referendum issues passes with 62% and 64% of the vote each...One involved a new, centrally located fire station and the other involved an indoor smoking ban for the entire city. Strangely enough, my mayoral candidate initiated both of those referendum....and HE LOST!

The indoor smoking ban turned out to be a Health Industry (which is BIG in my city) vs Tavern League (which is BIG in Wisconsin in general) issue. There was a lot of money flowing into the campaigns from both sides and it wasn't just from the locals either...National organizations were into this in a big way and tried to put their imprint on the whole process..The process of "obfuscating" the results is now underway. The Tavern Leagues are asking for a legal opinion on whether the ban includes "smoking sheds" outside of the taverns....if they can be "covered" or if they can be enclosed on two, three or four sides.....sounds like a smoking room addition to me....they are also taking issue with the effective date... I'm guessing that this will be in court for years.

I think it's going to be easier to resolve the fire station location issue...there is a way to involve people from both sides of the issue in bringing this to a happy conclusion and I hope the new Mayor will listen to the proposal....maybe he will..........then again....?????????????

The cards have been dealt...now it's time to play the hand.

Election Day....

Well....whatever happens...happens...

I went up to the local newspaper's opinion blog this morning and noticed that my candidate's opponent's supporters went on-line and posted the last word on every positive post about my candidate...mostly smears against him but occassionally, CONGRATULATING their candidate for running a CLEAN CAMPAIGN....

WHISKEY
TANGO
FOXTROT!

Do they really think people are that stupid?

Let's hear it for "plausible deniability"...

Let's hear it for "surrogate attacks"....

I'm so glad it's over....whatever the outcome, that will be the reality I will deal with for the next two years....

Why do I even try?

Election Day tomorrow

For my part, it can't be over soon enough. At this point, I'm so weary of the constant barrage of campaign ads, nasty letters blog entries, letters-to-the-editor, and "whisper campaigns", I don't really care which way it turns out.......well, I do, way down deep but whatever the result is, I'll deal with it.

My sainted better half called something to my attention last week that I should have had the wisdom to realize but obviously was too close to my friend's campaign to realize what was going on.

In short, I was so "into" the campaign that I watched every word our opponent said like a hawk and devined "conspiracies" in every detail. If the opponent said "when" instead of "if" then I was ready to surmise that the outcome was pre-ordained....in some fashion or another. I was "reading tea-leaves" that weren't really there and operating in the full-blown "crisis mode" that most local campaigns rely on in the closing days of a really close campaign....or what we THINK will be a close election...there were only 18 votes different in the primary and both campaigns went after the defeated third parties 911 (ironic no?) votes with a passion.

I heard from our candidate's blog/web guru yesterday who said that he was editing an entry to change ONE WORD at the request of one of our opponent's supporters. ONE STINKING WORD out of probably two dozen posts because they felt the term was "prejudicial" to their candidate.....whew.....

I guess I'm not the only one who was operating in "crisis mode".

Since I'm personally unopposed, I don't have much to worry about other than making sure that at least my wife and I vote for me. My friend has to "sweat it out".

On the Cover of the Rolling Stone.....

Matt Taibbi hits it out of the park in this issue of Rolling Stone....

Honestly I never thought of media manipulation in the way that he presents it here. Here's a few "snippets" for your enjoyment but I do encourage you to read the whole piece...

The net effect of all of this is to make the electorate exquisitely sensitive to constant prodding and poking by media stimuli, and what people don't notice is that that prodding and poking is tirelessly moving them in the same direction, toward a safe, inoffensive middle, away from anything that
smells controversial. The endless onslaught of tiny scandals trains the
electorate to be hyper-responsive to temporary, superficial outrages while
simultaneously chipping away at their long-term memories, their inclination to
look at the big picture, their ability to grasp subtleties of opinion and
policy.

snip

We're getting to be the same kind of people. We can't focus for more
than ten seconds on anything at all and we're constantly exercised about stupid
media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb
utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense — while at the same time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the national
budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars or so in
campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a small
mountain of favors for the next four years. And we... shit, I don't even know
what I'm saying anymore. I'm just tired of this tone that's always out there
when these scandals break, like we can't fucking stand the existence of this
Wright fellow for even a minute longer, not a minute longer! — when we all know
that come Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, Jeremiah Wright will be forgotten
and we'll be jumping en masse in a panic away from the next media-offered shadow to fall across our bow. What a bunch of turds we all are, seriously. God help us if we ever had to deal with a real problem.

I'm not sure that I totally buy the implication that the media purposely does this to us. I'm not sure that there is a conspiracy as such to make us lose our "collective memory" but I am pretty sure that it has to do with the phenomena that we've known about for years.

That is the media must constantly compete for our attention in order to attract viewers which equals audience share, which equals higher advertising rates and more money, more money more money...Hence....we move from scandal to scandal instead of moving from issue to issue.

Matt writes a good article...it's fun to read.

Another thought

I've calmed down a bit after the initial shock of seeing the audacious smears against my friend.

I'm now concentrating on how to counter it........I hope my friend doesn't get too depressed by this. He's relatively new to running for public office (second try actually) and I don't think he was prepared for this......

Now it's getting dirty....

The Mayoral campaign locally is getting pretty ugly. It didn't get this ugly last time but I think there is more at stake for the status quo faction than there was last time. A friend of mine emailed this to me:

Things are also getting very nasty on the thread that XXX's (name deleted) letter to the editor started. The check cashing issue and marital infidelity are the topics of the day. Fun stuff. I'm surprised more people don't run for public office.

Yep...that's about it...nasty stuff on an unmoderated newspaper website. But my friend has it exactly right.....this is why people don't run for public office.

Now, certainly, I'm not going to blame my favorite candidate's opponent for these things because he has personally behaved in a gentlemanly manner. But his supporters are scum of the earth and they have given him all the "plausible deniability" he can handle. He won't come out and condemn people who spread rumors, he'll just quietly sit back and tsk, tsk his way through it hoping some of the crap his supporters are throwing will stick to my candidate. It's an old political trick and he won't disassociate himself from it.


How do we move beyond this?

I've often wondered if I'm too idealistic to be in this job......just for the record, I have, indeed secretly held thoughts of retaliation and "tit-for-tat" blog entries on this issue, but I've never been able to bring myself to do them.

Maybe someday we'll all grow up and knock this S$$T off......maybe

Another glimpse at the "conservative soul"

E. J. Dionne Jr. has been one of my favorites for a while but I've always suspected that he's holding back how he really feels...

Today...he lets it loose.

You can read the whole article here but I've just GOT to post some snippets:

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

snip:

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.

snip

But if this near meltdown of capitalism doesn't encourage a lot of people to question the principles they have carried in their heads for the past three decades or so, nothing will.

snip

As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted of the era leading up to the Depression, "The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing."

snip

But in the enthusiasm for deregulation that took root in the late 1970s, flowered in the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the second Bush years, we forgot the lesson that government needs to keep a careful watch on what capitalists do. Of course, some deregulation can be salutary, and the market system is, on balance, a wondrous instrument -- when it works. But the free market is just that: an instrument, not a principle.

Wow......

I don't think I've ever seen a clearer example of the paradox of Conservative thinking....public sector intervention is okay in order to bail out the "captains of industry"....in order to literally save capitalism from it's own excesses.

Conservatives seem to have a problem in learning the lessons of history. In a way, I think, they are too much in love with the myth of "the invisible hand" and the "free market", neither of which have ever existed in any true sense, to see the reality of the dangers of unchecked capitalism. Perhaps I should be more precise by stating that what we witnessed in 1929 1981 and 2001 was capitalism running rampant.

It's examples like these that make me think that the image we liberal/progressives usually paint of conservatives as being....well....dumb....are founded in no small part by history.

sigh..............................