RTP-area local music and culture

[Anna Bigelow <abigelow1 AT nc.rr.com>]

only $5!
at the Berkeley Cafe, 217 W Martin St, Raleigh, NC
Goner, Viswas Chitnis, Swingin' Johnsons, Elisa Flynn
part of SparkCon20007
get sparky people
http://www.sparkcon.com/musicspark.html
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Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:20:44 -0700 (PDT)
From: Chris Calloway <ifoufo AT yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: A little off topic but I thought you should know...
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--- Todd Morman <tmorman AT nc.rr.com> wrote:
> todd but I eagerly await a more informed opinion
> from Mr. Calloway morman

i only have very slight information and not much
opinion in this regard.

i went to the orange democrats meeting thursday night,
which was a lot of less than uplifting arguing over
the rogers road waste transfer station plan. the
problem with grassroots politics is often the
participants are just plain ordinary people. you know,
the just solution to this waste problem would be to
measure what neighborhood produces the most trash and
go put a county landfill at the end of their street.

we have no philosopher kings. i used to wish more
smart people would shed their pride and disgust to get
down in the trenches of grassroots politics. but then
i went to work in academia and realized that those we
might otherwise think of as really smart are actually
just plain ordinary people also. so much so that a
just plain ordinary person like myself can go to work
in academia and make some recognizable impacts.

but before all the fireworks thursday night, which was
the most polarizing experience i've ever witnessed at
a meeting of people who are all supposed to be working
for the same things, the county chair told about his
recent meeting with Jerry Meek where potential senate
candidates were discussed. all the chair had to report
was what we already know, that Jerry says that a few
people are considering and may be about to announce
"soon."

i assume that means Grier Martin, Kay Hagan, and
Howard Lee, none of whom I'm excited about. in fact,
i'm not excited about any potential candidate of whom
i've ever heard as the subject of speculation
(Etheridge, Price, Miller, Kaplan, Young, etc.).

it's disconcerting to listen to what people consider
and toss around the most when deciding to run as well
as evaluating the chances of those thinking of
running: statewide name recognition and polling.

i'm not an enemy of polling. it's a necessary evil.
but there are useful times to do it, and particularly
bad times to do it. before a candidate declares or has
even stated a platform is a particularly bad time.
yeah, it is very wise for a candidate to somehow
evaluate what their chance of winning is before
declaring, because you can cause six years of damage
if you declare without a chance of winning. but
pre-campaign polling is only going to tell you how
good looking you are. and as we know, there's an
abundance of successful politicians with rather fugly
mugs.

as for name recognition, two of the most successful
democratic politicians in recent history won their
first elections ever as statewide candidates. they
came out of nowhere and won starting with zero
statewide name recognition. that would be jim hunt and
john edwards. neither had ever held public office
prior to big statewide wins.

i think the really important thing there was neither
brought any political baggage along with them. however
much either of them might now be career politicians,
they both became huge statewide political successes
without first being career politicians. same with
dole. same with helms before her. there's a lesson
there just begging to be learned.

so rather heavily discounting the two most heavily
weighted factors used by conventional wisdom to
speculate on who 'should' run, name recognition and
polling, i would say some other criteria should be
applied.

in 3.2.3's dream world, that should discount this or
that career politician from deciding themselves, and
instead favor somewhat informed and persuasive
citizens taking the lead in drafting candidates they
would *like* to see run. and i mean *like* to see run.
not so much an internal pre-campaign poll of who would
be most likely to win against dole, because without
previous political baggage, there isn't much to
realistically guage electability except who do you
*want*? candidates are made, not born.

in the past, in the case of hunt and edwards, that has
meant a few behind the scenes people with a great gobs
of cash to throw around getting together to anoint the
great outsider they would put up. you might not want
to wait for that to happen again unless you are
entirely happy with the results of that process, or at
least the interests of who has driven that process in
the past.

so, todd morman, who is someone in this state who is
deserving of our support? that is, who is someone who
has demonstrated a track record of making north
carolina a better place? which north carolinian would
make you proud to go to the polls and vote?

keep in mind when you think about this that both hunt
and edwards seem to have spent their entire lives
before running for office preparing for it. i'm pretty
sure both decided while in college they were going to
go straight from private life to the big leagues in
one quantum leap. that's what their private careers
before running for office strongly suggest at any
rate. jim hunt in particular had done simply
extraordinary things before running for office, such
as being the first american to go live in nepal when
it was opened to foreigners in the early sixties.

that is, such mindfulness could inform who you might
want. instead of just thinking of which dudley doright
makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, think about
who has best prepared themselves to do what you want
in high elected office.

does this make sense? i realize it requires somewhat
of a shift in how candidates are made. that is, we
don't wait for random career politicians to decide for
themselves, and we don't wait for not so random fat
cats to decide who they want. that is, despite
thinking we live in a democracy, it hasn't seemed to
have been tried much. but it is an alternative to
bemoaining the choices which just seem to pop up and
taunt us.

in this regard, i think you are probably much more
well informed than i. that is, i bet you probably know
more about who we might want based on how proud the've
made us and how well prepared they are.

i ask that rather than ask me for an ill-informed
opinion on which bozo might run (speculation sucks),
ask yourself who you would want to run.

my knowledge of such things is rather pedestrian. i
mean, even though i don't think name recognition
beforehand helps win, i only know of people i might
suggest because of their name recognition, which you
might hopefully see is not the same thing. people like
bill holman and chris fitzsimmons come to mind. bill
is probably far too modest to run for elected office.
and chris is probably far too street wise to run for
statewide office. but you know, i'd run to the polls
to vote for either, and would bug the crap out of
everyone i know to do so also.

that is, such as, and so on, also.

3