Showing that when a political
group’s resources are limited, making careful shots is key; and more generally,
that politics (as today) should be about possibility, not “ignorant armies
clashing by night”
Subsections below:
1. Time for comedy—Jay Edwards at WSUS, and our anticlimactic radio ads
Trying to gain in the home
stretch
The final “message decision” is made
2. A summary of the
structure of the campaign: Tiny resources, power in a tonal message
3. The election
results—hard numbers
4. The issue of “pay to play”
5. Party identity as a major candidate feature
6. Did the fact of slots on ballots for Democrats leave the door open
to mischief?
7. Politics as about choice
[Edits 10/8/13, including more comedy in End note. Little edit 10/9/13. Edit 10/11/13.]
1. Time for comedy—Jay Edwards at WSUS, and our anticlimactic radio ads
As I said in Part 4 (under
the subhead “Some personal eccentricity…”), the radio ads were one big focus of
criticism from Dick and Dan when we Dems met, partly to do a post-mortem, at
least as Dick and Dan were inclined to do. There was a definite difference between
the 1996 race and the 1994 and 1995 races with this. But the difference wasn’t
just in the tone or content of the ads.
I am heartened to go over the
old paperwork, showing just how expensive—and how big a chunk of the total
spending pie—using the local mass media can be for even a small campaign such
as ours. (Maybe I should have said at the start of this series: the township,
at least in about 1995, had about 8,000 homes and a population of about 21,000.
The physical size is about 64 square miles. The tax base in quite heavily
weighted in favor of homes, instead of businesses, which is quite unlike the
more developed parts of New Jersey. Sorry I can’t give more concrete figures on
this fact.)
Newspapers. Our newspaper
costs, the bigger bill being from Straus Newspapers (no real fault of theirs),
were bigger than for the radio ads, and I believe this was mainly because our
decision to set up newspaper ads, which is inevitably earlier in the process,
came when we had more money at our disposal (from the SCDC). By the time (in
late October) we were to arrange to do radio ads, we had little money left to
come from the SCDC. I remember Charlie Cart telling me there was only so much
more to come (he said this either just before or with the last check), and he wasn’t being spiteful or finky. (His
hands were tied probably based on how many, or how giving, his out-of-county
sources were.)
I have a copy of the contract
with Straus for $1,449, for two ads—a half-page running on October 24, and one
full-page running on October 31.
Radio. Some of my records
from this time are on photo-sensitive fax sheets, and they are quite faded. But
the important non-fax papers from WSUS show that, after a fax I sent the
station on October 30 asking some ground-rule questions, we signed a contract
on October 31 to record and schedule running of radio ads. The broadcasts (of
two different 30-second ads) would be on two days, the Saturday and Monday
immediately before Election Day, for 24 runnings. Total cost: $897. (I had told
the station in my October 30 fax that we had only about $900 to spend.)
How this compares to the
previous two elections is enlightening: I have information gathered about then,
probably from the state reports I saw, that shows that for the 1994 campaign,
in three different orders/installments, a total of $2,930 was spent for radio
ads. In 1995, a total (from four installments) of $6,130 was spent for radio.
I encountered one or more people
about that time (who as far as I know had never worked in campaigns) who spoke
of having been driven nuts by all the Vernon campaign radio ads they heard then
(for whichever party, I assume), and I forget whether this was for 1995 (which
would have made sense) or 1996. But it was the prevailing wisdom among Dick and
Dan—and probably whoever else had been heavily involved in the core activities
of the pre-1996 campaigns—that radio ads were the last, most powerful weapon
you had to try to win the race until right before Election Day.
On the surface, this makes
sense. But when the philosophy was to use this tool as voraciously as you could
muster and your messages could be anything that could let you hope to win by
whatever means, there would obviously seem to be lines to be crossed, both in
terms of the public’s taste and, one would think, in what seems professionally
advisable or effective among people who arrange them.
If Dick or Dan—or indeed anyone
else (including Republicans) who ran campaigns in the township—felt that the
sheer doggedness of getting out
communications was more key to winning an election than anything else—whether
this lay in fliers handed out at public locations, or mailings duly stuffed
into envelopes (almost until fingers were numb) by an army in a garage, or
newspaper ads, or especially radio ads—this premise certainly showed, among the
Dems, in the spending done ($6,000+) on radio ads in 1995.
We in the K & C campaign definitely
didn’t have such an option in 1996. As I’ve said, money (primarily from the
SCDC) ran out much more quickly. And as I’ve said, the 1996 campaign “budget”
was a little over half, in total, of what was spent on the 1995 campaign. And
within the busy 1996 period, we quickly ran into the wall of finding that our
money was dwindling when the “big, last, most powerful tool” of the radio ads
was yet to be lifted. What to do?
Trying to gain in the home
stretch
It was clear to me that, however
else you want to analyze this, selecting a good, resonating message was one of
the most important desiderata, if not the
most important one. In fact, if you had less to spend, being smarter about your
message might make up for this. This was common sense. And I also felt that, if
in our earlier weeks of campaigning we began
with conveying (in gently formulated newspaper ads and fliers) what nice,
work-well-with-others people the Dem candidates were (to boil down the later disappointed
characterization Dick and Dan gave our media message), it made sense in the
last days to gear up with something more incisive and “clinching of people’s
affections along the lines of a solid issue.” In late October, I felt that now,
with time running out and the competition naturally harder, we had to take the
opportunity to make a turn in our message and come down grippingly on the side
of an issue. Indeed, this would have been common sense, not anything especially
smart.
But also, I wasn’t the only one in
our campaign group dictating what our message would be.
For radio-ad copy, I had come up
with (typed, on the fly) two themes, with one about the town center. These
weren’t final wordage; they were to spur development of thinking.
But now, when we were (during
the early-evening hours) in the lair of WSUS, run by Jay Edwards, with Howard
Burrell making a sudden commitment to come by and help us out, some new rules
were about to be followed.
James Edward Normoyle, stage
name Jay Edwards, ran WSUS for years (he died about 11 years ago—see this obituary), along with Peter Bardach, who headed the news side of things,
I believe. (I remember seeing Peter Bardach, complete with his odd haircut, doing
some periodic interviews in the Sidewalk Café area of the Playboy Hotel when I
worked there in 1981.) I believe Mr.
Normoyle’s 2002 obit in the Herald or
another paper noted that he had written a pop song or two back in about the
1960s…and one would surmise that, in time, he realized one could, depending on
talent, make a surer living running a radio station, with the revenue stream
provided by the inevitable mechanics of the pop-music biz, with all those
royalties generated with the help of ASCAP and BMI, and a likely cut coming to
the radio station, etc.
Jay Edwards’ sonorous baritone
could be heard as he plied his DJ and promo-line role on the radio (in fact,
his voice featured in numerous tag-line promotional bits the radio routinely
ran). His voice reminded you a little of stagily vocal Ted Baxter, the
character played by Ted Knight on The
Mary Tyler Moore Show. That is, on the radio, in his stagy way with the
catch phrases and so on typical of the medium, his vocal tone reminded you of
Ted.
But in person, Edwards was even
more like Ted. Or rather, you were surprised how little his normal speaking voice—unlike
The Beatles who could sound so Liverpudlian in speaking voice and yet so non-accented in singing voice—varied from
his stage voice. With his hair styled in a way suggesting he was a little vain
about his appearance, his voice in normal speaking sounded fairly much as it
did on the radio. And, in line with how a high school classmate of mine in 2000
said that Jay Edwards, who lived in her community, was regarded as something of
a poseur, he could be a pompous sort in person.
The radio station had a fairly
simple layout. There was a central meeting room, and there was a studio across
the hall where ads could be recorded. (It was a surprisingly informal setup. You
could literally walk in and record an ad just off one main hall. Assuming you
paid the big fee.) Throughout the whole physical plant, it seemed, you could
hear the radio playing continually over a P.A. system. (Not a bad idea, to
monitor what was going out over the airwaves, in case there was a technical problem.)
And in those days, they had—was it
in the same room as the recording studio?—what was state-of-the-art, or close
to it, and today would be something you might see as a routine piece of
low-tech stuff—a mechanized machine that played songs from CDs in sequence,
rather like a little jukebox. To a fanciful person (and the WSUS people showed
it off as somewhat if giving one a privileged view of a nuclear reactor), it
might have looked as prodigiously high-tech as a submarine engine in this radio
station’s rather small quarters. Meanwhile, more realistically, it was melded
to a capacity of a DJ to walk in, quite calmly and insouciantly but with a
sense of proper timing, to override the music system for a minute to speak live
on the airwaves. This CD-playing thing was, as I surmised, what Jay Edwards’
tag-line voice on the radio referred to when he shilled about the “WSUS myooooo-sic machine!” (This elongated “ooo”
wasn’t meant to imitate the mooing of a cow, if you’re wondering.)
Earlier, the candidates and I had
waited, with the light outdoors dim and I believe trick-or-treaters on the
street, we chit-chatting and a bit nervous, perhaps, about what to do regarding
the radio ads; we waited for Howard to arrive. Finally, Howard rolled up in his
fancy car (he was coming, I think, from work about 35 minutes away). We quickly
went inside the WSUS building. The meeting room, with music piping in (though I
guess it could be turned off there, for serious discussions), was where the
group of us caucused—Jay, John Kraus, Ginny, myself, and Howard.
I handed over (to whomever) my
sheet with suggestions for radio-ad themes, and several looked at it. Jay
Edwards eventually was the one to hand it back, and he did so with a
barely-disguised air of disdain, as if to say, “I believe this is yours.” I also recall that John Kraus, when
he saw the sheet, didn’t really care for the ideas, which I could tell from his
face. This was where, in retrospect, I’d see his disaffiliation from how I was
guiding the campaign most weighed in; but this was where he would also take his
biggest risk, as we’ll see.
I then left the room; my role
was done. I waited somewhere until the various others came out to record the
ads, which used both John and Ginny, each for a different commercial, to speak
the tag line, “Paid for by the Committee to Elect Kraus and Crotty, Greg
Ludwig, treasurer.”
The final “message decision” is
made
It’s safe to say that, along
with Howard, who enthusiastically came with ideas of his own on how to shape
the radio ads, the group developed its ideas for a script, with key help from
Jay. I am virtually certain I recall that Jay Edwards had been considered
rather important to the Dems’ radio ads in the past two years. That is, you
didn’t just walk in with a ready-made script, with Jay only acting as a
custodian who would humbly get your ads recorded as you wanted, and dully finalizing
the contract to run them per a certain rotation schedule. Instead, Jay rather
positioned himself, I believe—and I think he certainly was talked about by such
people as key campaign managers like Dick and Dan—as a sort of wizard who would,
with maybe an imperceptible flourish, find some media-savvy way to formulate
your ads for maximum effectiveness. I do recall that whatever media background
the other Dems assumed that I had,
the likes of Jay Edwards impressed them much more strongly and significantly as
a true “media professional” who could do a rare, precious job like few others.
This time, in 1996, I think he
was a little surprised we had so little to spend. I mean, $900 after the $6,000+
of 1995 was quite a drop. So he didn’t see the best step as I would have, that you would come up
with a couple smart-enough issue-based
ads that defined who you were, in relation to the other two campaigning groups.
(Not that my particular issue-idea would have necessarily been a big hit.) When
Dick and Dan later took the ’96 group to task for the radio ads not focusing on
issues, they thought we had dropped the ball majorly. But who among the
seasoned campaign leaders in that WSUS meeting room in 1996 were helping shape
the ads, which said little more than that we’re nice people and expect to work
well together with others on the TC? Jay
Edwards and Howard Burrell.
For me, nothing symbolizes the
misstep taken here than Jay Edwards handing back my radio-theme sheet as if it
was scribbling from a halfwit, and then going on to cook up some ideas, with
the others, that were distinctly less than inspired.
I have tapes of the two
commercials that I recorded off the radio when they ran. I haven’t listened to
them for many years, but at least one has Howard speaking some fairly
nondescript copy almost the entire time, with some hokey
political-inspirational music playing in the back. Whatever specific little
ideas they invoked to show “Kraus and Crotty can work with the others on the
township committee” or the like, they said absolutely nothing about concrete
issues.
Make no mistake: Howard’s
message of “working together” was important to the 1995 race. When the two Republican
groups clashing most dramatically in 1995 seemed to define the matters most at
issue for the TC, a Democrat’s positioning him- or herself as an alternative to
“factional fighting” was a canny strategic move. And Howard had the personality
to make this work. And his winning would tend to support the wisdom here.
In 1996, though, that didn’t
really define what the race was about. Now there were three groups running.
Showing that we were “nice people” (and having a sort of “working families” and
moderately municipality-wise slant) was a good start, which indeed I helped
enforce when working with Chris Rohde (and Ginny) in coming up with the print
ads. At first, tone was a huge part
of the message; this was very much my idea. But in the last days, focusing on
specific issues was key. And yet Howard seemed to totally miss this point, and
remain with (his version of) the “tone” message. Jay Edwards certainly did not
help. And John Kraus apparently went right along with this, as if the veterans
knew best.
Whether it was a function of how
infrequently our ads ran, or how they sounded, I think I heard from someone
that he or she hadn’t even heard our ads on the radio.
Anyway, the results of the ads—or
their content’s philosophy—would show in John’s amount of votes, which are
sadly low, which even I feel bad about, on his behalf. As a hardworking person
on the campaign, he didn’t deserve this. But in terms of his not having an
issues-oriented message (which even seemed reflected in the fact that Ginny,
who voiced in the campaign some solid opinions on township issues, got more
votes than he did), it was not surprising. (See End note.)
(Added 10/11/13: Here is a press release from mid-October 1996; first is the first page of the typescript I wrote, which you can skip, and next is the version that the Advertiser News printed, which is not much different from the typescript. You can see a distinct difference between Ginny's message and John's message, which I recall well that they were allowed to pursue in the campaign. This difference, I think, wasn't a strategic mistake [since people in Vernon have tended to vote, for TC, along the lines of personality and the individual candidate's stand anyway], and tactically for me it was wise to do [since, heaven knows, if I was dictatorial in how we sent out a "unified" message, this would have backfired on me amid the personalities in the campaign milieu]. But I think Ginny definitely resonated more with voters than did John; and I had forgotten John's "quiet revolution" theme until I read it in these old records, and I think that was very much something he developed in league with Howard Burrell. I know it wasn't something discussed in my print-ad sessions with Chris Rohde and Ginny earlier in the campaign season. In fact, I think this "quiet revolution" phrase turned up in the radio ads. I will return to this issue when I get to Part 7, which won't appear for a while.)
(Added 10/11/13: Here is a press release from mid-October 1996; first is the first page of the typescript I wrote, which you can skip, and next is the version that the Advertiser News printed, which is not much different from the typescript. You can see a distinct difference between Ginny's message and John's message, which I recall well that they were allowed to pursue in the campaign. This difference, I think, wasn't a strategic mistake [since people in Vernon have tended to vote, for TC, along the lines of personality and the individual candidate's stand anyway], and tactically for me it was wise to do [since, heaven knows, if I was dictatorial in how we sent out a "unified" message, this would have backfired on me amid the personalities in the campaign milieu]. But I think Ginny definitely resonated more with voters than did John; and I had forgotten John's "quiet revolution" theme until I read it in these old records, and I think that was very much something he developed in league with Howard Burrell. I know it wasn't something discussed in my print-ad sessions with Chris Rohde and Ginny earlier in the campaign season. In fact, I think this "quiet revolution" phrase turned up in the radio ads. I will return to this issue when I get to Part 7, which won't appear for a while.)
2. A summary of the
structure of the campaign: Tiny resources, power in a tonal message
A political campaign, headed by about four people, delivered
thousands of votes. We did not have (per Dr. John T. Whiting’s theories) “car
pool chiefs.” We did not presume to have rigorously chart-delineating means to
have individual workers haul in very specific numbers of voters. We functioned as our resources would allow.
We relied largely on mass media. We started with a general
message that established our tone. If this tone was 85 percent of our message, and
was coincidentally echoed in the radio ads, then that—and not people organized in John Whiting’s manner—brought in thousands
of votes. When you tailored a story that would appeal, that would do the work.
In a way, you had no other choice when you had so few resources.
3. The election
results—hard numbers
Well, so much for trying to shove out this Vernon Democrats
series willy-nilly. And thank goodness I made up a fastidious “campaign
summary” about the ’96 race right when it happened. As I reflected in recent corrections
to Parts 4 and 5, I was wrong about some of who was running in ’96—but I think
that’s a function of how weird the race was.
The candidates, their parties, and the election results:
John Logan
(Republican)—for three-year seat, apparently—4,012 votes
Ira Weiner
(Republican)—for one-year seat, apparently—3,864
John Kraus
(Democrat)—for three-year seat—1,959
Ginny Crotty
(Democrat)—for one-year—2,226
Heinz Sell
(Independent)—for three-year seat—2,371
Dennis Miranda
(Independent)—for one-year—2,183
Chris Fuehrer wasn’t running. It was Heinz Sell running with
Miranda as a sort of “team” that made up the Independents. I’d forgotten about
that detail.
Ginny did come in with the fourth-highest amount of votes.
John Kraus’s amount is notable not only for his being well
below Logan’s—which, in terms of how the standard parties usually fared in
Vernon, especially in an election year, is not that surprising—but also almost
400 votes below Heinz Sell’s. Now that leads me to be rather annoyed on John’s
behalf. Sell was a bit of a crank; while he attended township meetings (as
anyone had a right to), he sometimes bothered the TC members whom he kept a
sharp eye on, and he also wrote letters to the editor with firm enough
opinions. He was a sincere man acting per his rights as a citizen engaging in
civic activities; but it was hard to imagine him, an elderly man with strong
opinions in line with his generation, as a good candidate for the young-family
township of Vernon and on the controversy-riven TC, where younger years seemed
apt to help given the stress involved.
On the other hand, he did make it his business to home in on
particular township issues (on which he could clash with sitting TC members);
and John, as I said, really didn’t do this in how he presented himself as a
candidate.
(Regarding how Mr. Sell fit in as a potential local leader: Local
stupidity could sometimes weigh in. When Mr. Sell wrote a letter to the editor
one time about what he termed the “trash” on the streets resulting from city
dwellers visiting to patronize Action Park, some local people—at least one
letter-writer responding to him—jumped to the conclusion that, apparently because
Mr. Sell was German-born, he was calling members of minority groups “trash.”
Actually, it was clear to me that Mr. Sell meant litter by “trash,” which, of
course, over many years has been there to see, clearly having emanated from the
cars of visiting city residents. Such littering was even very recently remarked
on by another newspaper letter-writer. Also, one day many years ago, when I
was walking past the Action Park, perhaps walking my bicycle up a hill, someone
threw a full can of beer at me.)
4. The issue of “pay
to play”
The concept of “pay to play” in politics receives a lot of
attention (as from journalists), it raises passions, and it has been addressed
legally in various ways (e.g., with reforms) in different parts of the country,
not least in New Jersey. Not an expert on it, I am not going to analyze or
comment on it definitively here, but I’ll look—from a simple, common-sense
perspective—at how our 1996 campaign was funded, and ask (as readers of this
series might already have), “Was there ‘pay to play’ going on here? If not in fact, could it have gone on, with the way things were in 1996?”
The reason I bring this up at all is that, surprisingly to
me at the time, John revealed that he had to write “thank you” notes to one or
more of the people who had donated to the SCDC, with the result that their
money ended up with us Vernon Dems. One donator in particular was a man who I
believe was a lawyer at a branch (?) of a law firm named Weiner Lesniak (or
Werner Lesniak; my confusion on the spelling), in Parsippany. (I think, but am not sure, that the main location of this firm was in
Roseland, N.J.) Ray Lesniak, of course, has long been in the state senate (a
Democrat representing Union County), and he is a lawyer. What his firm was
doing, as was said to me sometime in 1996 I think, was backing candidates with
the hope that, if the candidates were elected, they could try to get the firms
business in the relevant towns as counsel to the township committee, planning
board, or any other body that normally had an attorney (paid, of course).
Lezniak’s firm, in particular, did this speculative campaign-donating with a
large number of municipalities. I believe this was quite legal at the time; I
don’t know if it still is.
Naïve about the whole thing then, I felt that John’s task
would have been awkward for me, if I had to do it; he seemed to take it fairly
much in stride. I already knew that counsel was named routinely to various
boards by members of the governing body (in Vernon, the TC), and these
counselors were used throughout a year on a kind of retainer, with their terms able
to be renewed at the next government reorganization time. However these firms
came to be considered by the TC (and of course different firms or attorneys
could be proposed by different TC members as candidates), they were voted on by
all of the members of the TC.
It was a bit of a horse race just as it was for any
individuals being named as volunteer members of the boards; you got your name
considered (e.g., I asked newly elected Howard Burrell if he could get me a
seat on the Zoning Board, or such), and either you got a majority vote (or even
unanimous vote in some cases) and got on the board, or not. Howard reflected
to me one year that it was quite a
horse-trading process (not his exact words) getting people named to boards at
reorganization, which was obviously harder to do as TC members were of vastly different schools of thought on
policy issues.
Whether law firms were subjected to any more “rough and
chancy” horse-trading in being named as counsel to boards, I don’t know; it
wouldn’t surprise me. But suffice it to say that just because a law firm had
donated money to a local candidate, through the county Democratic committee or
the like, that didn’t guarantee that
the firm would get a position as counsel to a board in the candidate’s town. I
remember feeling that, if I were in John’s shoes, I would feel embarrassed
writing a “thank you” note when, as hard as my campaign group had tried, we
didn’t win (and moreover, considering the results and conditions, it wasn’t
terribly likely that we’d win to begin with).
5. Party identity as
a major candidate feature
In some respect, John may have felt that, as a true-blue
Democrat running on the ticket, that fact should have recommended him to a good
number of voters. That might have worked in plenty of other New
Jersey towns, but not in Vernon.
You needed to do more than just “stand on your standard party platform.”
Another way to look at this is, as I remember arguing to different people more
than once in those days, the standard party philosophies really had no bearing
in Vernon Township. Candidates could present
themselves as “from the Republican party” or “from the Democratic party,” but
how they really stood up as candidates had to be defined in their grasp of
township issues. Since the culture of not only the town but the county is to
assume that any viable local candidate should start as a Republican (if from
any party), then if you ran as a Democrat, you had to give some special reason
why you were really worthy of choice.
The party identity issue had implications in a few
directions. Sometimes people, who started out as Democratic, would switch their
party affiliation (with the Board of Elections) to Republican just to be that
much more viable as a candidate (this happened with John Warren, in the late
1980s, who served on the Vernon TC as a Democrat then moved on to the county
board of chosen freeholders, running—and winning—as a Republican after having [for
the purpose] changed his party affiliation).
This, to me, I would never have done. If I ran, I would have
said that, locally, I wouldn’t apply standard Democratic philosophy to township
issues; it simply wouldn’t have made sense. But I wouldn’t have changed my party simply out of expedience in order to
be “electable.” I would rather not
have run for office than to do that.
Another aspect to this is what I referred to in my letter in
1996 about the race in The New Jersey
Herald, which I provided a pdf about here. When one was among
a local party group, that was like being in a “club based on faith.” If you
wanted to be in a Republican or Democratic group, that was OK for the reason
you had affinity with other people along the lines of nationally oriented
politics, but in many respects, standard party ways of thinking that worked on
the national level didn’t apply on the local level. So a candidate’s
positioning him- or herself because he or she was a “true Democrat” would have
been like the candidate’s advertising him- or herself based on his or her
religious affiliation. Anyone who did that in this local region should have had
his or her competence questioned as to fitness for local office.
Similarly, there were local people who posed a litmus test
for Howard Burrell based on the sole issue of abortion. I think Howard
mentioned having heard this, but I might have heard it from someone else directly,
too: the voter would only have considered him as a Democratic candidate based
on where he stood on abortion. When it came to a race for the TC, this, to me,
raises questions of competence in the voter as a voting citizen.
6. Did the fact of
slots on ballots for Democrats leave the door open to mischief?
But (prior to changes in the form of Vernon’s government) the
ballots still routinely had slots for Democrats. Sometimes they would go empty.
But the fact that a Democrat would always fill the slot on the ballot if he or
she got enough signatures on a petition meant there was a road to Democrats’
running.
This was what left a door open for our club and campaign
groups in the mid-1990s to even have a realistic chance at all of running
someone. The question could then be posed, notably by local Republicans but possibly
also by Democrats, just because there was
that slot, how do we know if the candidates are worth our consideration?
Isn’t it a bit of an easy thing for any Shmoe to get the signatures and get on
the ballot as a Democrat, when the Republicans have a more naturally and
demandingly competitive weeding-out process?
This is an interesting question, but in a way it is always
answered when voters go to the polls. If people thought a given Democratic
candidate “got onto the ballot too easily,” they could always not vote for the person.
It was amazing how the abiding disadvantage that Democrats
were at—that as a baseline matter, they were ordinarily not considered as
credible as Republican candidates—was not fully grasped, or worked with, by
various people in our Democratic group. There were some who uncritically
thought we should run as Democrats and fly our party flag as openly as we
dared. I thought this was a mistake, and I think the results in 1994-96 proved
it. Only Howard Burrell won, after a tough race (in 1995) where a ton of money
was spent on radio ads, and even then he didn’t win over his Republican competitor
by tremendously much (and it helped that the other Republican, Chris Fuehrer,
looked callow by comparison to Howard).
It’s kind of interesting to recall that some of our party
literature, including in 1996, had reference to “working families,” which
seemed in accord with some standard Democratic philosophy. This might have
clicked with some in the area, and less with others.
(I’m leaving aside detailed comment about why Republicans are favored here. A
thumbnail sketch is that, far from this area’s “rural” quality as being the
reason—as if Vernon Township were merely echoing the topography-based ethos/culture
of the Deep South or the American West—people here, in choosing to make this a “Republican”
area, are primarily reacting to the
prevailing political ethos of the more urban areas surrounding New York City.
They are rejecting big-machine Democratic prerogatives, and how minority
populations determine the politics there. [Sussex County is about 97 percent
white.] Having lived here, not continuously, for over 45 years, I would quickly
point out that Vernon Township is very much more part of New Jersey than it is “part
of Alabama” or “part of Wyoming.” If you want details of why, we’ll have to
save that for more confidential discussion than on a blog.)
7. Politics as about
choice
For myself, I would never have changed my party affiliation
to Republican to run for office in town. I would rather have worked with
Democrats for three years as I did, and lost, than to change my party
affiliation. This may have seemed to some among the Republicans as a “losing
strategy,” but to me, helping a campaign that floated Democratic candidates was
a way to offer the public choice. It
wasn’t only about a mean horse race between family-fight Republicans. You had
some people from the other standard party too.
And even if some of our candidates were a little on the insufficient
side, maybe in terms of their grasp of local issues, they stood for something
valuable than I am proud of having been part of: offering people choice in
whom to vote for. If we grant that politics should be about possibility,
about coming up with novel and effective solutions, then a way to offer a
township additional choices of candidates, who can speak their minds in public
forums to show what they’re about, is one way to do that. If people understand
this much, rather than thinking a given Democratic slate was just a set of
“stooges” working for Gene Mulvihill, then they might appreciate the choice.
As it turns out, not only did we meet with the inevitable
suspicion from some that our candidates were Mulvihill minions, but you would
on rare occasions hear some lame-brained remark such as that Howard Burrell was
all about “tax-and-spend” as a Democrat, even though this fiscal approach could
hardly be put into practice on the township level.
And as we know from higher-level and broader phenomena of
politics, you can offer people choice to appeal to their intelligence, but there’s
only so much you can do in facing the sheer stupidity that exists among some
voters.
##
End note.
On Jay Edwards, a couple little stories are amusing. Here is one: A high school classmate of mine, whom I'll pseudonym Aaron, had worked at WSUS in the 1980s--Aaron is the same person I've mentioned in a prior blog entry, this one from the summer, in the subsection headed "What to make of number 1?"--who became a township health inspector in the later 1980s. Like so many of us with dreams of working in the media, he worked at WSUS for a time in his early twenties, and I think he did news reporting. I think he even appeared on, or was tested for, a cable TV news program that was produced by the video/cable arm of WSUS's company. This cable station, I think, was a crude version of what could be done of that type in those days.
Aaron told me a story of Jay Edwards' warning him to stay away from his daughter, as if Edwards was trying to preempt a "disaster" that Aaron hadn't even given him a solid hint would happen. It was such--as Aaron told it--that, later, I joked with Aaron, imitating Jay Edwards in an insistent, Ted Baxter-ish pompous-boob voice, "You stay away from my daughter, [Aaron]! Don't even think of dating her!"
##
End note.
On Jay Edwards, a couple little stories are amusing. Here is one: A high school classmate of mine, whom I'll pseudonym Aaron, had worked at WSUS in the 1980s--Aaron is the same person I've mentioned in a prior blog entry, this one from the summer, in the subsection headed "What to make of number 1?"--who became a township health inspector in the later 1980s. Like so many of us with dreams of working in the media, he worked at WSUS for a time in his early twenties, and I think he did news reporting. I think he even appeared on, or was tested for, a cable TV news program that was produced by the video/cable arm of WSUS's company. This cable station, I think, was a crude version of what could be done of that type in those days.
Aaron told me a story of Jay Edwards' warning him to stay away from his daughter, as if Edwards was trying to preempt a "disaster" that Aaron hadn't even given him a solid hint would happen. It was such--as Aaron told it--that, later, I joked with Aaron, imitating Jay Edwards in an insistent, Ted Baxter-ish pompous-boob voice, "You stay away from my daughter, [Aaron]! Don't even think of dating her!"
