Those of you about to run, we salute you — well, I do anyway. After covering local races for most of the last two decades, I haven’t found anyone whose candidacy brought nothing to the table. Even some candidates dismissed as running for loopy reasons, or those who just signed up and were rarely heard from again, have provided some insights into the inner clockworks of a participatory democracy.
It takes something to run for public office, to put yourself out there. Yeah, often large egos are involved, but you’d be surprised how many people do this for rather humble reasons. The spectrum has ranged from newcomers who are convinced they are going to ride into office and “clean house†to people who signed up because they thought someone with their physical challenges ought to give it a go to show others it could be done.
Most people in local government get their start in public life because something has happened in (or to) their neighborhood. They might have served on a board or a committee or participated in an effort that prepared them for the possibility and perhaps inspired them to participate in the system, or frustrated them such that they decided to run and try to fix it.
These people wind up running because it is a natural step rather than a calculated one. A dearth of ambitious rogues is one of the beauties of politics at the local level, just as it’s opposite is what makes national politics so damn ugly.
I suppose that could change, but is there something leveling about the grinding out of local public policy that tends to weed out those who are in it for a quick win. If you know Carrboro and Chapel Hill, you know that just about nothing happens fast. The community gets a say here, and then some, and the people I’ve seen become successful in local politics are generally better listeners than speakers.
So, my advice to candidates is get out there and listen. You have a rare opportunity to connect with people and you’ll learn amazing things about where you live.
My father-in-law’s candidacy a few years back underscored the simple elegance of such an endeavor.
A Democrat in a small, very Republican town, he’d lost his council seat by a handful of votes more than 30 years ago. After decades serving in other ways on boards and commissions, he decided to run again.
Like the town, his district had grown quite a bit. Still, he decided to campaign the only way he knew — door to door. He divided the district into routes and tried to get in 35 houses a night, walking the old neighborhoods he knew as a young man and the new cul de sacs that had sprung up since. He knew he had an uphill climb, and in the end he lost the race. But he came away having been invited into hundreds of living rooms, listening to the stories of newcomers and old-timers alike. He told me later that most people he met had never talked to anyone connected with the town government or any candidate for its leadership.
You could tell there was some solace in helping make that connection for folks between where they live and what it will become.
That is the essence of local government. The verbs we ascribe to candidacies — “run,†“stand,†“campaign†— only tell part of the story of what elections are all about. This is also the chance to listen, and the more the better. — Kirk Ross