This has been a bit of a weird
summer for me, at least in terms of blog writing. Normally, summer is not my favorite season—the heat and
humidity, separate or together, typically interact badly with my health, though
the season also has its mixed-in charms. Anyway, sometimes my productivity can
go on a bit of a vacation in summer. (Taking the long view, I am usually more
productive in the winter.) This plus some recent reevaluation of what this blog
should do has led me (not altogether consciously) to slow down…and with all
else, I come up with new strategies….
But as always, we’re being
pragmatic too.
Some of the entries envisioned
in my May 3 "signpost" entry are in various states of abeyance. The book review I’d
promised, of the 1998 memoir by Rosemary Mahoney, A Likely Story, is on hold; a large amount of it is done, and I
think my more book-oriented readers would like it. But I’ve put it on hold, somewhat
by default, and I think it will come out in some
venue eventually. But for now, it’s not in the offing.
Items mentioned in a May “signpost” entry
My two local-color stories, on the radium-contaminated soil issue in
Vernon Township in 1986 and on local-Democratic politics in the mid-1990s,
can be very substantial and of interest to local readers, and may interest
readers outside the area, too.
* But the radium-soil thing,
unfortunately, has to wait indefinitely, partly because I can’t find my cache
of news clippings on this. I do have material (including photo negatives) with
which to make a very truncated version of the story, but I don’t want to do
that. So it is on hold till further notice.
* The Democratic-group thing I am readier to do, and it can be
interesting, but I think it will have limited appeal in one way: if readers are
looking for me to make a statement about Democrats on the state or national
level, the entry wouldn’t be about that. In good part, it would be about the
idea of people working together in a spontaneous, goodwill fashion to provide
possibility to a wider town—almost a Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington story, but with the political jurisdiction being a
small town, not D.C.
Also, I am conscious of how
local friends were part of the 1990s story might view it (or certain details of
it)—it is very much about an achievement of a
group of people, not simply me or me and one or two others—so I would want
to shape it while eliding it in some ways to keep certain things appropriately
confidential. I think there is enough to say from my own angle while I “keep in
the shadows” some details either out of discretion or because it wouldn’t be
quite relevant today. Also, I don’t want it to become such a complex entry in
terms of editorial issues that I get frustrated with it. But I think as the
coming election season builds in, I will be inspired to put something together.
Aside from this specific project,
I think it is important to remember that politics, even if you have no more
ambitious a part in it than voting now and then, is about possibility, not, for the simple voter, being about “I’m ready to kill, so give me my ax!” It is in the atmosphere of this latter mentality where
campaigns seek to make their defiant-faced candidate, who may in other
circumstances—pardon the phrasing—be a bag of shit, look like a birthday cake
for the hope-starved populace. (And no, I’m not talking about a
certain ebullient fellow I referred to tongue-in-cheek at the end of my review of Eyes Wide Shut).
So the Dem-story entry might be
out by early October, perhaps in September. (To whet your appetite, not far
below is a sort of “teaser” to the projected entry that, in part, reproduces a
published letter of mine from 1996.)
There are other blog entries in
the works, which I do talk about in a Part 2 to this entry.
##
A letter published in
December 1996 reflecting on a loss for Democrats in a township, and what the
challenge for us was to be on a par with the Republicans
[This letter was published in the December 9, 1996, New Jersey Herald. (I would presume ©
1996 The New Jersey Herald.) I have corrected or changed punctuation in a few
places, from how it appears in the published version. A pdf (74 KB) of a photocopy
of the published letter appears here—note that the first column has a
streak of faintness, making it slightly hard to read. End notes are provided for this blog version; they do not appear in the original.]
Democrats think
Vernon needs second party [editor-supplied headline]
Editor:
For the past couple of years, for different reasons, Vernon has been the
county’s laboratory to test how readily Democrats can get elected to local
office. Vernon’s been a sort of beachhead for
the possibly resurgent county
Democrats. As one of the
main point men in this, let me comment.
Why vote Democratic for Vernon Township Committee? Myself,
I’ve never been a friend of the idea that “we all think alike,” and this was
one of my primary motivations for working for the Vernon Township Democratic
Club and for three Vernon
Democratic campaigns, including the last, which I helped manage. [End note 1.] But what kind of “all
thinking alike” have we had in Vernon?
The township Republicans have in recent years been
characterized as engaging in “factional fighting.” The idea of a one-party
system in a small town seems to imply this. If everyone who’s a political
player in town has to belong to the same party, though standard party ideas
don’t define the local issues, you have the mentality of a club based on faith.
In this case, “faith” means a set of beliefs that aren’t relevant to practical
matters they might be expected to deal with, though they may be valuable in an
outside realm (in this case, higher-level politics). And in Vernon, just as people live here to escape
the costs and complications of more urban life, their gravitating toward
Republicanism suggests that they seek a political resort here. They want a
party membership that reflects unpretentious folk versus big interests, whether
these interests are big government or business.
But in clubs based on faith you can have factionalism. And
with factions, you have fights along the fault lines of egos, perceptions, and
petty differences. And it seems to me and others in the local Democratic club
that, independent of partisan ideas, the value of a second standard party in
town politics is to shift the debate away from factional fighting and to a more
natural, more traditional, clearer debate, or to debate between groups that
typically have this. [End note 2.]
But look at the latest Vernon election results. Total votes for
both Republicans were 7,876; for both Democrats, 4,185; for both independents,
4,554. [End note 3.] The
overwhelming fact shown by these results is that when most of Vernon’s
registered voters come out to vote, as they do only in a presidential election
year [which 1996 was], and about 75 percent came out this year, most vote
Republican [End note 4]. This seems
particularly likely when the pro-local-business Republicans are running. [End note 5.]
It wouldn’t be surprising if some in Vernon have looked
quite skeptically at a second standard party, representing a minority of
registered voters, presuming to try to establish debate between two parties
with parity in town. And our club and campaign groups have made tactical errors
since 1994.
One of the biggest problems we’ve faced over three elections
was how to present our party identity. One theory in our township party group
held that we should fly the arch-Democratic flag out in front, all the way, in
a pitched partisan battle. Others among us, including me, thought along the
lines that we should claim that, yes, we are a Democratic club, and yes, we
have candidates for local office, and we’d just present them as individuals who
could grapple with township issues and were fit for office. Meanwhile, we’d
acknowledge in some way that, as is so obvious, party doesn’t define township
issues.
Thanks to the volunteers who helped us in this election.
This coming year [1997] the township may see more realistic
Democrats running candidates.
##
End note 1. I
actually did more than this; I have considered myself the de facto manager in
this 1996 campaign, rather than the treasurer, which was how I was officially
listed (and also functioned). For one thing, I closely oversaw and arranged all the advertising, in
both print and radio forms, while the named manager didn’t do this. The full
story will make this all clear, and I have no hard feelings in this apparent
lack of full credit for roles played.
End note 2. This
remarking on having debates as the parties typically do was meant only in a
most general sense, at least in terms of removing within-party factionalism.
Clearly, on the local level, the Democrats could not have been what they were (or
are) usually about; for instance, whether you satirize them as all about “tax
and spend,” or consider them more sympathetically to be about government
intervention into problems, there was no analogue for this on the local (Vernon
Township) level, nor was there any need to claim this specific thing at the
time. This though, given the bias against Democrats in the area, some
Republicans could still paint a Democratic candidate in a cartoonish way more
appropriate for national politics. For instance, some local citizen(s) talked
about candidate Howard Burrell, in I believe 1995, as if, as a Democrat, he
would mean “tax and spend” for the township, which was (to me) eminently
ludicrous. As it happened, Mr. Burrell won in 1995.
End note 3. The “independents” here were actually, and pretty
obviously at the time to people they appealed to, members of the “rebel [or environmental]
Republicans” in town, while the Republican candidates were obviously “business
Republicans.” See this entry, under the subhead “Some
Political Background,” for my comments on the distinctions between these
groups.
End note 4. This though,
as the numbers show, in this case the Republicans identified as such won by a plurality, not by a majority of votes.
End note 5. Note
that, also, one of our Democratic candidates actually got more votes than one
of the “independent” candidates. This reflected, as my fuller story would spell
out, that local people tended to vote along the lines of the perceived
qualifications of the individuals, not just (or mainly) along the lines of
party. Further, more generally, it was quite difficult, and would have been for
anyone, to strategize in a local campaign (with limited help and $5,000+ budget)
when three sets (three parties) of
candidates were running, not two.
