The story I'm about to tell you relies on second-hand information. Even so, this type of incident is not foreign to political campaigns - especially small, local ones.
Recently, I have been helping out the campaign of Steve Blunt. He is running for Village Trustee in the Village of Webster. Because I am one of the current co-chairs of the Green Party, that does not mean the party is giving Steve an endorsement. While I have recommended that other Greens check Steve out and decide if they want to help, I am doing this on my own.
Steve is a democrat. His views are pretty progressive; he wants to work for more renewable energy being used in the Village, more open government & local businesses as opposed to the corporate stores that are overtaking the surrounding Town of Webster. As this addresses 3 or the Greens' Ten Key Values, I figured I'd help him out. You can check out his site at http://www.websterdemocrats.com for more info.
Steve's opponent is named Peter Elder. A republican. I don't know the guy, but in working with the Blunt campaign, I've heard a lot about him. Second-hand.
The election is on March 21st - this Tuesday. Over the course of the last week or so, Steve Blunt's lawn signs are mysteriously disappearing, while almost every single one of Elder's remains standing. Now, no one has made any accusations, but when this fact has been brought up, Mr. Elder has become rather defensive - again this is second-hand. Must be the wind, some would say - the weather's been kinda bad lately.
Could be, but I've noticed that Steve is doing something I haven't seen before. He's using the normal wire frames for his lawn signs - in addition to a wooden stake that goes into the ground. A tank shouldn't be able to uproot these signs more or less the weather. Meanwhile, Elder's signs are gigantic, more susceptible to wind and they've stayed up.
No accusations - just observations.
Now, here is my take on the issues in general. In a perfect world, you have whatever number of candidates (notice I didn't say 2 candidates), doing their thing, spreading the word and may the person the voters want, win. But it doesn't work that way. If you subscribe to the Steve Minarik book of campaigning, anything goes and if you don't like it, it's because you're a loser. (of course now that he works at the state level he doesn't like all those "mean" democrats) Lawn signs, ducking debates, not letting 3rd parties get involved...all this garbage. What are the corporate parties afraid of?
It's not about democracy, it's about getting whatever I want. Making sure that everything around me is comfortable for me. Everybody whines and has complaints & excuses. It's a slight of hand as in the meantime, tax breaks are given to corporations, cronies are given jobs and the machine goes on as usual - at every level of government.
Gosh, it's too bad there isn't a political party that doesn't do all this stuff. Oh yeah, there is.
1 comment:
Good point ! As evidenced by the current "culture of corruption" in our government. Never before in the history of our nation have we had so many members of an administration in jail, indicted, formerly convicted (felons),and lying,...so boldly !
They'll do ( & have been doing for the past 3 decades) anything to win.
And now they're controlling the voting process.
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