Mmmmm.....the smell of candidate sweat fills the spring air

I love politics.

Well, let me clarify. I love local politics…not the loud, national, multi-million dollar advertising kind of politics.

I love county races where the guy running for judge may have washed your car when he was a kid or you may have had a drink at a party with the fellow trying to be the next county commissioner.

But most of all—more than anything—I love local, in-town, at home politics.

We’re currently embroiled in election season for city and school board candidates and the process brings me massive joy and anger both.

Knowing that there are people interested enough in an issue, in their town, in their children’s education, to give up their time to campaign is wondrous to me. These are people willing to stand up in front of friends and neighbors and say “I want you to want me enough to get up on a lovely Saturday and spend, oh, maybe 30 minutes going to vote for me. I want you to trust me enough to believe I might not make things even worse than they already are. I want you to think I’m smart enough to do this.”

How much more dangerous to one’s ego can anything be?

And, while they might not really be aware of it yet, they aren’t just pledging to show up for meetings and stay awake during every boring thing that must be discussed. They are also promising to answer the phone when Joe down the road has a pot hole in his street and is really mad about it. They’re saying they’ll take time in the grocery store to listen to a teacher’s concerns about something at the school.

Well, that’s what the best ones are promising anyway.

What makes me angry is a candidate who has an agenda with one item on it—a candidate who’s out to get someone or who wants their kid to be able to wear his hair in a green Mohawk or who thinks he can throw some business to a friend.

I ran for city council once myself because it was something I had always wanted to do.

Spending years as an editor writing about the workings of the city (and complaining loudly in print about how badly it was being handled), I got first-hand exposure to the process but I didn’t feel like I could do my job and be a city councilman too. When, finally, I was no longer an editor, I had no more such conflicts and I had the time. So I put my name down.

I felt like so many people knew me and what I stood for that, if they agreed, they’d vote for me. And I made no effort at campaigning or selling myself. Well, they either didn’t agree or they didn’t care.

I lost.

Thankfully, I wasn’t the lowest one on the list of results but I was pretty close to the bottom. And it made me realize how hard it all is—not that I was delusional enough to think it was easy but I just hadn’t been smacked hard enough by the actual difficulty of asking people to trust you to do the right thing.

So now I’m watching this year’s crop of hopeful candidates. There’s a conflict brewing on the school board; the city, as usual, doesn’t draw enough strong, intelligent people and there is a wet/dry election lurking on the ballot (picture ominous clouds overhead, with Satan and a pitchfork here).

It will be a fun election. I’m hoping for the best.