(“Local color” is the category
for stories about local matters that may certainly appeal to local people who
read this blog, but not necessarily to a wider audience.)
Subsections below:
A slow start in becoming any sort of community activist
Getting involved with local-board business stemmed out of my
rudimentary newspaper work
The Board of Ethics started in a “flammable” environment for it
I ingratiated myself on board chair Reinhardt by simple, intrepid
attending his board’s meetings as a member of the public
The board seemed to carry on in a biased way at times
A Democratic campaign gets fire, from numerous directions; Burrell as
an adaptable candidate
The Dem campaign gets a new manager, and (coincidentally) really
catches fire after (and maybe due to) the summer Board of Ethics controversy
Chuck Reinhardt’s role in my running for county committee in 1995
A prelude, on the issue of focus
on numbers versus global quality to a
message
[Edits 9/19/13. Edit 9/30/13. Edit 10/11/13. Edit 10/23/13.]
For younger readers, this may
all sound like a lot of codified, stilted, pretentious talk; they may conjure
pictures of blowhard Capitol Hill types, the crazy confetti of campaign ads,
etc. But simple political involvement in your own small town can be an
important education in what it means to support democracy in the U.S., as
imperfect as democracy is here on the local or national level. If you want to
make sure fascism never takes root here, you don’t merely draw pictures of what
a monster Adolf Eichmann was (or should be seen as), but you take a small step
in the direction of participating in civic life, and help, on whatever level
you can, decide such things as municipal budget.
I have not come from a political
family, and I’m not even sure what party my father was, though I think he was a
Democrat. (My mother is a lifelong Republican.) But I am glad to have been
involved in the limited time I was (and am not regretful it ended). I even ran
for office one time. This is similar to the idea “It is better to have loved
and lost, than not to have loved at all”: it’s
better to have run for even a small local office, and lost, than never to have
partaken in any level of politics, and then to endlessly complain about those
who do.
##
I never thought I would be any
kind of activist in a Democratic group; and certainly, Democrats, as I indicate
here, were almost never winners in Sussex County, N.J. I
will recount this story—there are things from a series of years (1994-97) that
make a good story, with rising and falling action—initially from memory, and
then I may refer to my records when appropriate. (This will especially be
important for the year 1996, when I managed the Kraus & Crotty campaign for
township committee that fall.) When I am writing and feel I need to look at
records to get more exact or more detailed, I will put “[needs research]” or
such, and will try to follow it up (though it may take time). Also, I will try
to be discreet on some matters related to individuals, where details might be
embarrassing to them, and not key to the story.
A simple point: Why would I be
so circumspect about local-politics stuff like this, and not about work matters
(regarding which latter, some might say, I over-divulge on this blog)? The
answer is simple: this politics stuff was volunteer (and even if you got
elected to township committee in the 1990s, you got a small stipend; no way was
it a paid job where you could support yourself in the area; and members of
other township boards were not paid).
Serving on campaigns certainly was volunteer. Not only that, but in serving in
good faith on a board, you could be subject to uncomplimentary coverage (to put
it nicely) in the local media. You could raise notoriety about yourself that
spilled over a bit, unhelpfully, into your work/personal life (e.g., I heard one
or two stories about some people feeling ostracized, or looked at as suspect,
at work—even if their work was outside the county—if they ran for office within this county).
Meanwhile, in the work world,
you were working to get paid, to pay bills—loans, daily-living costs, etc. If
“politics” happened there, it could pose a material threat to you. Threats
could be real from the Vernon political arena, but (in my experience) usually
they weren’t as bad in potential consequences as threats within the work world.
(By the way, I’ve long thought I
had some of the skills I used within the Vernon Democratic arena in the
mid-1990s because I’d been clued off
to what skills I got to develop in myself from, first, work at All American
Crafts in 1990-91. And believe me, learning such interpersonal skills for
someone like me was an important area of growth: I was never so interpersonally
skilled during my school years as I would need to be in more political areas in
the 1990s. It took the scalding bath of AAC—where you had so many egos to deal
with [even if the vast majority there were among women]—to clue me off to
become more of a “politically sensitive person” as, not entirely in a straight
causal line, would suit me better for the local-political realm in the 1990s.)
Also, this Democratic story
shows that my experience in the Vernon
political realm isn’t all defined by Skoder and the problems arising from (or
associated with) her.
Another dimension of this is:
New Jersey may seem to you—it certainly does to me—a volcanic area in terms of
petty human behaviors, so why get involved in local politics here, even while
you’re in a dicey area of the work world? For me, this worked out as a sort of
“therapeutic” matter: when the work world was turning out highly political for
me—in the area of the print media I was working in in the early 1990s—doing (in
my free time) the volunteer local-politics stuff was a way to be constructive,
even creative, with my life, where I wouldn’t have the same anxieties and
depression that could arise from financial threats within my work life. In the
1990s, moreover, I had the energy to do this (I was mostly in my thirties in
this period). I think it’s fair to say that, today, in my fifties, I wouldn’t
want to take on this double load of petty-politics work world on one track and
nasty-politics civic life on another track.
A slow start in becoming any sort of community activist
I was never much involved in
community stuff during grade school in the 1970s (though I was in the Cub
Scouts briefly in the early 1970s, not that I did any real community service
stuff there, at the level I was at). Even when I worked at the Marvin Center at
GWU in the early 1980s (for an intro, see here, that was a job, and
it was an important support to me personally; and with it, you didn’t need to
learn to be a “political animal” the way, I would imagine, members of the GWU student
government did, for the sake of functioning within their context.
My first taste of community
activism of a sort didn’t happen until I moved back to New Jersey, and that
involved the radium-soil controversy in Vernon in 1986. And, as it happened,
due to how my own life (especially my school career, intertwined with
concentrated writing efforts) was turning out that year, I was depressed enough
in a way by summer 1986—when the radium-soil issue erupted, and it was sudden
(I was out of town when it started)—that I was not entirely up to “hitting the
ground running” to do something in the vein of community activism. I actually
did do something, and in retrospect it’s a minor miracle I did much of anything
then. I have letters to the editor in 1986 partly attesting to this, and
if/when I ever tell the full story of that radium-soil stuff, I can make the
picture clearer. But I was very much an amateur in that type of endeavor then,
and what I did publicly hardly had much effect on things. Plus, it was very
much an area where the more-animated people who staged the large protests and
got various messages into the mass media were the ones who really controlled
the show and effected the change that ended up happening.
I did get involved in helping
work on the Appalachian Trail, my first taste of which was in 1989 (a teacher
at the high school, Paul DeCoste, whom I’d never had as a teacher but whom I
knew from the drama club, was a local A.T. rep and was instrumental in my
getting involved). Then I joined the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference in
1991; I would be a member of that for 20 years. I helped in an ad hoc group,
spearheaded on its volunteer side by Mr. DeCoste, that built the suspension
bridge and boardwalk in the Pochuck Creek basin in 1995 and 1999. (A federal
government publication outlines this massive project.)
Meanwhile, once my editorial
work in nationally distributed publications started in 1990, my energies were
very much sucked into that, and for a time, my local-community activity was put
on hold in a sense, or very delimited, or preempted. Even when I worked for The Vernon News briefly in 1989 and in
1991-92, this was paid work, and not (by definition or by my intent) community
activism of any sort.
From 1990 to 1993, I was
laboring mightily to do better in my paid-work life, and ascended from AAC to
AB Bookman (1992-93) and then to Clinicians Publishing Group (1993-94). During
this period, I had my student loans from college to repay, and starting in
1993, a car loan. It was a very typical middle-class-grind period for me.
Getting involved with local-board business stemmed out of my
rudimentary newspaper work
After I left The Vernon News in May 1992, I had seen
enough of Vernon politics—from an outsider’s perspective—to want to continue
attending township government meetings, to see more how the government there
worked. I started attending as a member of the public, taking notes in the type
of steno notebooks that I had used for news-reporting purposes. I would do this
for two-plus years, until well into 1994. By the later 1990s I would have
attended close to 300 township government meetings, as a member of the public,
often taking notes, very occasionally speaking on a topic on which I felt
qualified to speak during the “open to public” part of a meeting. (It was
partly on the basis of learning about the local government this way that I ran
for Charter Study Commission in 1995, when about a dozen candidates were
running for five seats for that ad hoc committee.)
Anyway, it was 1993 when I first
started attending meetings of the new Board of Ethics in town, and this was
really the key trigger for me to get into Vernon
Democratic politics. The Board of Ethics became quite controversial in town,
and was abolished by the township committee (the main governing body) in later 1994.
It was in the wake of this, and (not directly related) with the national
turbulence over the failure of the Hillary Clinton–chaired health-care reform
efforts being made on the federal level, that I decided to no longer be an
unaligned member of the public attending meetings, and (while I was aware of the risk of thus becoming politically "aligned") I joined a Democratic
campaign group that got into full swing in fall 1994.
This inaugurated my being
involved in township Dem activity until early 1997, including a township
committee race in 1995 in which Democrat Howard Burrell won, the first Black
man to win a seat on the township committee in Vernon, and then my being de
facto manager of the race (Kraus & Crotty) for the same township committee
in 1996. I emphasize that, as my subsequent parts of this story will make
clear, I was part of a group, an enthusiastic bunch of fellows (male and
female), and it wasn’t simply a tale of what I did.
The Board of Ethics stuff may be
very obscure to people in town today. Its activities, amazingly, are now about
20 years ago, and its basic purpose and most sincere workings were not too well
understood at the time. It was also chaired by township resident Charles (“Chuck”)
Reinhardt, who died within this year (2013), who I think became bitter about
how the Board of Ethics became abolished by the township committee in 1994. He
also had a small role in some stuff that happened with the Vernon Dems in 1994,
which I think you’ll find amusing. One might think that I became bitter at
Chuck Reinhardt, but this isn’t so; but how things wound up between him and me
became ironic. I don’t want to cast a shadow on him in the wake of his death,
but want to elucidate some things that have multiple sides.
The Board of Ethics started in a “flammable” environment for it
The Board of Ethics was
established in Vernon in 1993—following legal provisions, I think, that were implemented
or supported (and explained, perhaps, by a rep who may have helped out) by the
state Local Finance Board (which has its own “board of ethics” to serve those
municipalities that don’t have their own boards of ethics). How the Board of
Ethics specifically got started in Vernon, I don’t know. But there were certainly
people in local politics—mainly, among the Republicans—who felt it was needed.
To make a complicated story simple, this was a period in which the two de facto
Republican groups—the “business Republicans” and the “rebel (or environmental)
Republicans”—were active. (See here, under the subsection “Some
Political Background,” for some explanation of the two groups.) As a matter of
local political culture at the time, there was no Democratic group that had any
sway in town amid whatever controversies went on between the two Republican
groups.
Individual Democrats had, of
course, run for the highest council in the township, the township committee.
Daniel Borstad was one, and he won; he was on the committee by 1992. Richard
(“Dick”) Conklin ran a few times, in 1990 and other years. By 1994 he had run
three times, never winning, which proved mainly that Democrats usually couldn’t
win in town. There were, I think, some other Democrats (including a Marie
Bennett) who had run in town in the late 1980s and maybe early 1990s.
When the Board of Ethics—whose
chair, Chuck Reinhardt, was a registered Democrat—started its work, it early on
got a fancy complaint submitted by Arlene Holbert, a Republican who was also
chair of the township Planning Board. See this entry from last year, under the subhead “A taste of the 1998
assault-phase stuff…,” for some information on her—she is referred to as
“AH” in the entry—and in that entry you can link to an old news clipping, at
Exhibit C, where she is referred to; all this stuff shows her, from admittedly
partial glimpses, from when she was in the prime of her active town-politics
life when on the Planning Board. In her complaint to the Board of Ethics, Holbert presented a set of allegations about several men,
including Mark Nelson, who himself by about 1992 had served on the township
committee and was mayor one year; the complaint alleged a conflict of interest
and/or such on the parts of these men. The men named in the complaint were
among the “business Republican” group; Holbert, arguably, was among the “rebel
Republicans” (though in her case it might have been fairer to call her
“anti–business Republican”).
The Board of Ethics held
meetings with formats similar to other boards in town. Typically, a board
called the meeting to order, had decisions to make like approving minutes,
opened itself to comments from the public, had a period where it conducted
business in which the public could be present, and alternatively could elect to
go into “executive session” where members of the public had to leave the room.
Most notably, the Board of Ethics was different in that—whether it had its own
capacity or choice to go into an occasional “executive session,” its most
substantive business, discussing a complaint that had been submitted, had to be
done with the public absent.
So when the Holbert
complaint—incidentally, I think as a matter of form, complaints were never
identified as to who submitted them, but it eventually came out she had
submitted this one—was discussed, members of the public had to leave the room.
I ingratiated myself on board chair Reinhardt by simple, intrepid
attending his board’s meetings as a member of the public
I attended numerous of the
meetings of the Board of Ethics as a member of the public, with notebook in
hand. This may sound like a nerdy thing to have done, but regarding this board,
it was a surprisingly brave and in a sense necessary thing to have done (which
I was conscious of at the time without being self-congratulatory about it).
There was so much bitter politics and paranoia surrounding the tensions between
the two Republican groups, and regarding the role of the Board of Ethics in
particular, that for any member of the public to regularly attend its
meetings—much less someone not obviously aligned with any group like me—was a
cause for suspicion, on the part of Chuck Reinhardt, at least.
And I was aware how “paranoid”
he was of me, and it took some time, and my amenable attitude toward him and
the board, to really get accepted as someone who turned up at the meetings, to
be exposed to whatever limited stuff the public would be allowed to see. I
might have made it clear to him—and certainly believed this—that I first came
as I did to any of the other important boards, with the same goodwill
objective. I was to be a member of the public seeing how things were done
(with, whether a given board knew it or not, there was the possibility that I
could write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper—something I was already
known for doing—to be an unaligned commentator of sorts).
Eventually he would understand,
as any other board leader in a similar role should, that to whatever extent I
might write on anything, I was a potential conduit to the public understanding
more how his board was supposed to function, and to be a sort of “neutral”
support to it, to the extent I could do so as someone who attended meetings and
occasionally wrote letters to the editor. If this seems labored and redundant
to say, it actually seemed to take months of my attending meetings of his board
for Chuck to understand this about me. (And all of this was volunteer, unpaid,
mind you.) I counted it as a nice accomplishment that I got him more trustful
of me, which was no small feat given my busy paid-work schedule and my never
having the fullest ability to engage in bonhomie such as might allow other
local board members or attendees to “get on well with everyone.”
The Board of Ethics met monthly,
even while there was some consternation, to say the least, among other township
political people about what the board was up to. The Holbert complaint was
dealt with over several months, and eventually Chuck and the other voting
members of the board elected to refer it to the state Local Finance Board,
because of what Chuck said was the complaint’s complexity. (I don’t want to say
too much, because of lacking full information, but I am almost 100 percent sure
the state eventually dismissed the
complaint in 1994 or 1995; and maybe it only concluded on one advisory thing to
convey to one of the people complained about [this latter point needs research].)
But the Board of Ethics became
so much the focus of controversy in town—while Chuck felt a bit embattled in
his role—that eventually an item was put on the township committee’s (TC’s) agenda
in later summer 1994, regarding the proposal to abolish the Board of Ethics (I think
this was proposed by Marianne Reilly, about whom more below). The TC heard from
different people giving testimony, including Chuck Reinhardt (I think). I
myself also spoke as a member of the public. The board was indeed abolished.
The board seemed to carry on in a biased way at times
What members of the public would
not have known, and I do not mean to impugn Chuck Reinhardt in this, is that
members of the board did speak at meetings as if they had already made up their
minds on the culpability of people like Mark Nelson, who was one target of
Holbert’s complaint. It was actually a bit startling to see. I don’t remember
who all the other members of the board were—there were five total, I think,
including (if I recall) a Christopher Bump (a local chiropractor)—and Patricia
Dros (I forget her party affiliation) was one. Sue Cifelli served as the recording
secretary for the board (not a voting member). (Both these women, by the way,
were named as defendants in Skoder’s lawsuit against six former friends in
1996.) I think both these women have since moved out of the township; I know
Dros has.
Anyway, various members of the
board—certainly Chuck, and probably Ms. Dros, and even Ms. Cifelli (while she
was merely a technical supporter)—commented in informal talk before a meeting
was closed to the public (before seriously dealing with a complaint was done) as if Mark Nelson was guilty of what other
alleged about him, in general terms if not in specific terms spelled out in a
complaint. I thought this was not the best form. Also, Cifelli, and I think
Dros too, had served in a political campaign in 1992 or so (before they served
on the Board of Ethics) that served a candidate (Marie Bennett, I believe) who
was running against Mark Nelson for TC.
Incidentally, it was not
specifically with regard to this that I commented before the TC when it was
about to abolish the Board of Ethics. This sort of thing may have been on my
mind, but there was no practical (or tasteful) way I could reference this
specific behavior in speaking before the TC. What I do recall well is that my
sense the town was too political for a Board of Ethics was a conclusion I
reached on a number of bases I gathered over time.
There was a lot I took in about
the Board of Ethics, what I saw in attending its meetings, and what I heard
(secondhand or otherwise) outside its meetings. I wasn’t jaundiced about it; I
was indeed fascinated by how it tried to function, which was almost in a
besieged way. (I felt I was in a little rowboat with the board members, as they
met in their little room, amid the turbulent seas of the larger array of people
in town who were suspicious of, indifferent to, or antagonistic to the Board of
Ethics.) Thus, by the time of the TC hearing meant to decide on whether to
dissolve the board, while I had decided for myself that the board really should
be abolished, I knew I had earlier tried to be a booster for it while attending
its meetings, mainly thinking that if it did its business in the most honest
way, it could serve a good purpose in town. I thought it was a sad turn for me to
speak out against it before the TC, and I figured Chuck might have been
surprised when I did this. But I wasn’t so much being “bitchy” to him as I was
acknowledging that the “writing was on the wall” for that board, though Chuck
might have been the last to appreciate it.
When I spoke in favor of its
being abolished at the TC hearing, I think Chuck—who was duly there—might have
been a little embittered at me, in a sort of “Et tu, Brute?” way.
I remember talking about the
board at some point to Christina Clark Rohde (who I mentioned here regarding a self-published book she wrote), or Chris Rohde as I
normally knew her; and Chris felt that a Board of Ethics was a kind of
preposterous thing to have in town. She called it a “Star Chamber” sort of
thing. She didn’t really know firsthand enough about how township politics
operated, within the boards, on a nuts-and-bolts level, which would come out in
other contexts; but I think her general view of the Board of Ethics was
reasonable enough, to the extent that it paralleled my own more
empirically-based view that the town was too political for a board like this. (Chris
would be an active member of the township Dems in 1994-96, and in an ironic
development I am eager to get to later, she would write some of the campaign
material for the 1996 Kraus & Crotty campaign, under my stewardship. You’ll
be amused to see how I guided her to write some of that campaign literature.)
Anyway, politics in Vernon suddenly got
interesting as 1994 headed toward Election Day. For the first time, there were
Democrats running for township committee—who, as it turned out, gave local
Republicans a run for their money.
A Democratic campaign gets fire, from numerous directions; Burrell as an
adaptable candidate
There had already been two
Democratic candidates running for township committee in the spring: Howard
Burrell and Bill Bravenboer. Burrell had served on the Board of Education for
many years, and Bravenboer was a carpenter who had served on the Zoning Board
or the Planning Board, I believe for a relatively short time.
I was actually surprised that
Burrell was running. In my peregrinations as a notebook-toting member of the
public, I had seen him among the very few times I had attended a Vernon
Township Board of Education meeting. He chaired that board, and led the
meeting, once or more of the times I went. He would offer a “thought for the
day” when starting the meeting. He seemed to get notice in local newspapers as
a mover-and-shaker, but only within the sedate, judicious confines of the Board
of Education.
By the way, with the vast
majority of New Jersey’s public schools being funded by local property taxes,
the Vernon situation, I think, encapsulates (in unusually bitter form, in a
way) the typical municipal financial structure across the state: a local Board
of Education gets its funding—in Vernon’s case, about 65 percent of local tax
intake—through property taxes that the municipality administratively takes in,
while the municipal government is run, to the extent there are political
officers elected, by a township council, committee, or such, and a mayor
elected or selected in some way (depending on the specific form of government
at hand). When people vote for township committee or mayor, maybe fired up over
“too-high taxes,” they feel the mayor and committee are the ones to blame.
Hence there could be the most bitter political campaigns for these offices. But
the most tax money is used by boards whose composition, and elections, are far
more sedate and “suited to people of sober, high purpose”—the Boards of
Education. So it has amused me that people are (when irked by property taxes) like
dogs trying to kill each other when it comes to running for mayor or the like,
while the Boards of Education seem to have elections no more
public-controversy-tinged than boards of trustees for a church; but money for
the schools is clearly the largest part of the local-tax pie, and is in a sense
the least subject to variation in amounts of money demanded from the tax
revenue.
So you can have a bitter
campaign for mayor or council, with a lot of screaming about taxes. Once these
people are elected, then the yearly striking of the budget for the town becomes
the next thing for heavy controversy to surround; but the schools always get
their 65 or 70 percent out of the municipal tax revenue. The Boards of
Education can have their own tough decisions on what kind of budget to have,
but there, there is not much wiggle room. Even when school budgets are put up
for approval by the voters, in some towns it could be fairly rare for a school
budget, or a capital project to be voted on, to be voted down. But regarding
what 35 or 30 percent is left of the tax revenue—to be split between the town’s
needs and some money going per law to the county—there could be nasty fighting
over what gets spent on the town—X for new snow plows, Y for new furniture in
the municipal building, Z for a new police car, etc.
All of which is to preface this:
With Burrell’s “thought for the day,” I thought he was a bit of a quaint choice
to be running for township committee. I thought that, with the latter
committee, you would be better equipped with a “curse for the night” (as it
happens, the TC meets nights).
It would turn out, though, that
Burrell served as an effective and charismatic candidate for the Vernon Dems.
He didn’t win in 1994, but he did win in 1995 (more on the latter in a future
entry). And after serving on township committee for a few years in Vernon, he
would go on to run for, and win a seat on, the county Board of Chosen
Freeholders—the county-level governing body—in 1999, for a term that ran 2000-02.
I won’t say too much of a subtle
and mixed sort about Burrell in future “Local color” blog entries, though there
are certainly observations to be made.
For now, the lively 1994 campaign
story…
The Dem campaign gets a new manager, and (coincidentally) really
catches fire after (and maybe due to) the summer Board of Ethics controversy
Burrell and Bravenboer had been
running in the spring; I guess they’d be on the ballot for the June primary
(and had won; thus they were on the ballot for the fall general election).
Also, from what I understood (by later 1994), Chuck Reinhardt had been managing
their spring campaign. But then by later summer 1994, Dick Conklin had taken
over their campaign. How this happened, I don’t know. And certainly Reinhardt
was in an embattled enough position when the Board of Ethics was abolished in
about August 1994 that he would be in a sort of weak position (regarding public
perception) to be running a campaign later that year (and for the typically
“losing” Democrats, no less).
There developed a rivalry
between Dick Conklin and Chuck Reinhardt in fall 1994, the reason so far
obvious; but details of this, as it went on, I will be sketchy about.
When the fall campaign really
got underway by September 1994, Burrell and Bravenboer were running for the
Democrats, and two “rebel Republican” candidates, Dan Kadish and Paulette
Anderson, were running. I forget who the “business Republicans” were who were
running, if any. Maybe none that year.
The campaign was in such a novel
ferment that Marianne Reilly, a longtime township Republican (and a “business
Republican”) who was on the township committee in 1994 (she might even have
been mayor then) backed the Democrats, Burrell and Bravenboer, over the
Republicans Anderson and Kadish. Meanwhile, Chuck Reinhardt, a longtime local
Democrat (and fresh from having the Board of Ethics abolished), backed Anderson
and Kadish and not the two Democratic candidates whose race he had supposedly
been managing in spring 1994. This crossing of party lines made big news in The New Jersey Herald at the time.
Anderson was viewed especially
skeptically by some (as a kind of amateur, I believe), and after she and Kadish
were elected in November 1994, Anderson would attract the most controversy while
serving on the TC during 1995. (Kadish, believe it or not, and when elected, has
served intermittently over the many
years since—not for most of these years; he is on the
current version of the governing body, the township council, today, elected
most recently in fall 2010 or 2011.)
The Vernon Democratic group
behind the two candidates comprised an enthusiastic group, mixing a number of persons
from vastly different directions: there were the two candidates and their
families; there was Dick Conklin, who had run for township committee a few
times in recent years; there were Dan and Margaret Borstad, who were longtime
Democratic pillars in town (and Dan had served on the township committee, and
was mayor one year, some years beforehand). And there were some newcomers to
the scene: myself and Chris Rohde, who wrote a lot of the fliers (some mailed,
and some handed out on the street) for the 1994 campaign; and I think included
in this early group were Jerry S. and Mary Harrington (the latter since
deceased), two friends of Chris’s who, like Chris, had been Democratic
stalwarts from where they used to operate in New York City or its close
environs. There were other people too, including a couple surnamed Triano—who
would be among the Dems’ steady supporters—and a few others whom Dick Conklin
knew better than I, as well as some who may have just turned up fleetingly to
hand out fliers once or twice at a local post office or store, or who might
show up at Dick’s garage to help stuff envelopes to be included in a mass
mailing. [Update 9/30/13: I forgot there was also Dotty R., who lived (and still does?) in McAfee, not far from Dick. She was a stalwart (starting only in 1995?) as an example of a longtime union-involved Democrat, as were several of the others in the group, though I think this was her first time being in a Vernon Democratic group.]
(A number of these standard sorts
of activities happened, collectively speaking, in the Dem group in 1994-96, but
it could vary just how many or in what form—and by which people—were employed
in any specific year of those three years. But 1994 was the first of the three
years—and I believe the first Dick had ever been involved in—where, for the
township Democrats, so many of the campaign functions came together “under one
roof” and with such a motley array of enthusiastic supporters. I mention this
because I would keep careful statistics of these things when I was managing the
1996 campaign, which stats tend to show just how likely, or not, that sort of
campaign “confluence of activities” would continue from year to year.)
When the group of us met at
Dick’s garage to hear election results in early November 1994, and we found
we’d lost, a New Jersey Herald
photographer was present, and took a picture of Burrell. He looked deeply
disappointed in the photo appearing in the paper. His face would look
differently the same time next year, when he won.
There was also the involvement
in the 1994 campaign of Dr. John T. Whiting, a public relations professional,
in an aspect of the campaign that is very curious and that has to wait for a
future blog entry. Because this man has been involved, summarily speaking, with
Gene Mulvihill, even as recently as in public relations activity on the heels
of Mr. Mulvihill’s death last fall, it is important to realize how little a
dynamic role he played in the 1994 Dem campaign. Though he certainly tried to
act as a sort of campaign manager, I think his role had very little impact on
the outcome (despite how he tried to operate). More details in a future entry
will make this clear.
Overall, by the measure of the
motley group that worked well together in 1994, and that provided the
foundation for an even more effective group in 1995 (with Dr. Whiting decisively
absent from the group), I think the Democrats captured the interest they did in
Vernon Township in 1994 because of (1) controversy that led to public interest
in township politics, such as the Board of Ethics trouble, and (2) the
between-Republicans rivalry that led to Anderson and Kadish being considered
controversial by some; (3) maybe the Clinton health plan collapse interesting
some people in local Dem politics; and (4) most importantly, and operative in
any year (in the 1990s), the instigating nature and content of local radio ads,
which in most or all circumstances have been, or used to be, the single most
effective tool in terms of messages most widely broadcast and with limited lead
time before Election Day—a topic I will definitely look at again.
The fact that the 1994 Democrats
generated such interest in the news, and actually scored big enough numbers of
votes [needs research; (update 10/11/13) for some supporting info in some election results in 1994 and 1995, see Part 3 of this series] to show we
were a force in town, led those who did the most work in the campaign to be
ready for the next phase of the group: in 1995, spearheaded by the enthusiastic
Dick Conklin, a new standing club was started, with incorporation and officers
(I was made secretary). It also published a newsletter, edited and produced by
Chris Rohde, and mailed to all registered Dems in town. Dick also got some of
us, and some new people invited to get involved with us, to run for elected
seats on the county Democratic Committee—a body that has no governmental power
but is mainly about selecting and supporting candidates for elective office. And
the club would prepare candidates for the next (1995) election season in Vernon.
Chuck Reinhardt’s role in my running for county committee in 1995
One amusing little anecdote
concerning Chuck Reinhardt is that, when Dick was rounding up people to run for
seats on the county Democratic Committee—which entailed two representatives,
male and female, from each voting district in the township (at the time, Vernon
had 15 districts)—he was also interested in having the group, if/once elected,
to choose Charlie Cart, who would represent a voting district in Frankford
Township, to be elected (per the committee’s bylaws or state law) chairman of
the county committee. Meanwhile, Reinhardt was trying, in early 1995, to get a
set of people elected to county committee who would be on his side, not on Dick’s, with the goal to elect someone else, a
Tony Ballestrino, as chairman of the county committee.
This led to the little
development of Chuck getting someone to run against me in my voting district,
and that person, who no longer lives in Barry Lakes, had served in that
capacity before. He was a known quantity here for that role. Chuck wanted that
man in his corner, and also, not un-obvious to me, Chuck was probably bitter
about my speaking out against the Board of Ethics at the TC’s hearing where it
considered the board’s abolishment in summer 1994 (not that my comments had any
decisive effect on the matter).
Well, Chuck’s man in my district—his
surname was Wronko—got elected to the county committee seat, in June (I think)
1995. It wasn’t hard, in my view, to see how I hadn’t been apt to win. Part of my
basis for this view is that (less to the point) I had never run for a political
office in the Barry Lakes voting district before, and (much more to the point)
I certainly had never comported myself around the voting district as a
Democratic representative (which certainly wouldn’t have flown anyway, as there
are significantly more registered Republicans in the Barry Lakes/Highland Lakes
area; and in general, at least at that time, the district had people more apt
to vote pro-Republican than a good percentage of the rest of the town). Plus,
Chuck had probably impressed on his man, Wronko, to win, and his motivation was
stirred in part by Dick Conklin’s clear enough rivalry with him (which held even when
Chuck had turned up, after the November 1994 election, at one of the very earliest
meetings of the newly forming Dem club at Dick’s house, where it typically met,
and Chuck never came there again).
There would later be a happier
development, vindicating me in a sense: the next times I ran for a seat on the
county Democratic Committee were 1999, 2001 (I think), and 2003, and each time
I would win. And you know what? This was amazingly easy to do, for a political
campaign. Of course, first, I had to go door to door to get signatures for a
petition to be on the ballot (based on numbers of voters in the party in the
district, the requirement was just four or five!). Also, I prepared my own
campaign literature, and mailed it to the 50 or so Dems listed on the voter
list for my district that Dick managed to get (as he did for other Vernon districts) from the county Board of
Elections.
Typically, whenever the position
is on the ballot, only about 15 people voted for the person
running for county committee. (This is because the larger number of registered
Dems, and the average number apt to vote in the primary, conform with that
small number.) In 1995, when Chuck’s man won, the man got 11 to my 4 votes.
Then in 1999, when I ran again, I won by 11 to 4 [needs research; I think I ran unopposed, but 11 voted for me, and
an additional four didn’t vote for the position]. In one or more of the later
races, I ran unopposed. And won with about 11-15 votes. That was all it took to
be elected to the county Democratic Committee, whose main function was
selecting and backing candidates for actual, important elective offices in the
county.
There were a total of 30-40 or
more people on the entire county committee, so don’t worry if you fear the
seeds of mayhem were sown when a noodge got elected with only 15 votes.
By the way, I never really bore
Chuck Reinhardt ill will after the county committee situation in 1995. But
interestingly, every time I would encounter him, usually at the Highland Lakes post office, over many years, he
either seemed to not know me, or to know me and not care to greet me—and I
didn’t make an effort to try to say Hi to him. (This didn’t really bother me.
He also could be less than friendly to other people I knew well, such as my mother,
whom I don’t think he knew as my
mother.) This was true until within the past few years, one time I saw him when
he seemed distinctly older and, as his recent death suggests, perhaps sick in a
way that would lead to his death and that, incidentally, may have changed his
broader viewpoint on things a bit.
His obituary was eye-opening in
showing how much he was interested in peace efforts through the world. Hence I
point out that he really was sincere about making the Board of Ethics work; but
for one thing, the town really was too political for it to function in town in
the 1990s. Also, I think he spoke in off-moments when in the board’s small
meeting room as if he was a bit biased about Mark Nelson, but I think that
aside from this, he did try to be
dispassionate about handling the complaint about Nelson. (Which may explain
why the board eventually transferred the complaint to the state level.)
A prelude, on the issue of focus
on numbers versus global quality to a
message
One important thing about this
all is that, as small as the numbers may seem to be, still reading the numbers
of election results, and inferring what you can from information from the Board
of Elections, is important in deciding how you are going to strategize for an
election in a local area like Vernon Township. This is obviously a key part of
much larger elections, which we see glimpses of in the newspapers all the time.
But another thing is that, when
you have very limited resources on a local level—you are running a race where
winning by a margin in the dozens or hundreds may be an important benchmark—there
are other key things to be mindful of than simple numbers. If there are only a
very small number of people running a campaign, there is no way you can think
in terms of “If I do this X, then I can easily rake in 300 or 750 votes.” The
way you exercise controls over what you are doing is different from having some
kind of precise calculus.
This is why, when Dr. John T.
Whiting was working in the Burrell and Bravenboer campaign in 1994, ultimately
not having a real effect (and in one way causing a serious problem), he was way
out in left field when in November 1994 he sent a number of us campaign
operatives a letter where he seemed to be giving “relevant summary advice” in
talking about how our efforts delivered, for example, “4,795” votes, including
the aspect of how we had “exceed[ed] our goal by 595 voters”
[italic/boldface in original]. In my firm opinion, it was ridiculous for him to
talk in terms of specific-number goals in this effort, or as to whether we individual workers had played a real
role in terms of delivering a certain
number, or exceeding a goal or not. Setting our sights on a number, as if
he had any efficiency in doing this, was not something a small group like ours
could realistically do. The fact that he thought it was, and how he analyzed this, begins to get at the wrongheaded,
even comical, and in some ways bizarre role he played in our group—which again,
as I said, had no real effect on the election outcome.
I recall how at one of the last
group meetings he supposedly chaired, when people started talking among
themselves as if decidedly ignoring him—which he seemed not to appreciate—this
showed how ineffective he was there. And what really made a difference for how
our campaign fared was individuals of us greeting people and handing out
literature on the streets; mass mailings; far-reaching radio ads; and the
simple choice of candidates, “not par for the course,” that our campaign provided
voters. This was generally not something that could be analyzed in terms of any
of us being responsible for X numbers. More details on this aspect of the 1994
story in a future entry.
Anyway, 1995 was the year the
township Democrats really got going as a solidified group with a standing club,
newsletter, regularly attended meetings, and then beefed-up campaign group
(with no Dr. Whiting) in 1995, with the result of one candidate actually
winning. It seemed at times we were engaging in overkill with how much
standing-group stuff we were doing—including fundraising efforts like a
summertime picnic—but it did seem to provide some “sine qua non” for when, in
the fall of 1995, a more fluid, ad hoc campaign group did its thing, we
actually had a winning candidate.
