Having noted below that there really isn't a forum for a concession, I realized I could just designate this as my forum and go ahead and concede, even though my opponents don't read my blog. Anyway, I am disappointed, and I didn't realize how disappointed until the day wore on.
First of all, as an effort of the Grassroots Progressives slate, the outcome was phenomenal. Karen Weinstein was re-elected with an unstoppable lead, and Ces Rosales and Edie Irons unseated two incumbents. Two of the other incumbents who were re-elected promised to work to increase the committee's activities in a slate platform that was very similar to ours. Now there is a set of priorities they can be held to in the next election, which hasn't happened before. The final committee member who was re-elected has been on the committee close to one million years, and she came in fourth, rather than first. Other great outcomes: we all know more about political campaigns than we ever did before, and we met great people, including each other.
For me, I didn't come in last, or even second from last. I feel like I got a respectable number of votes. I got 4527 votes. Just for comparison, Jody London, who won the school board seat from our district, got 5707 votes to win. Granted, its a smaller area she was running in, but I still got a lot of votes. Tony Thurmond, who was endorsed for the Assembly by every major paper in the Bay Area got 4345 votes, and Nancy Skinner, who won that race, got 10904 votes. That's just more than twice what I got. So we ran a competitive race and did a good job, and we will all do better in our future races.
That's my silver lining speech.
On the personal note, I had a terrible hearing today. It was the third day of this public hearing on a single job classification. It has been long, boring and contentious. Today one of the commissioners recused himself after yelling at the employer's witness. He was furious at what he perceived to be her mismanagement and disrespectful attitude towards the people in his region. He was right. I was very sorry to lose him from the process and it set in motion a huge set of hassles that were demonstrative of the backasswardedness of the public sector. Truly Kafkaesque. Then the employer's attorney made a veiled threat about actions that might be taken against a witness, and I sort of lost my shit. Fortunately, we weren't in the presence of the commissioners, but wow, it shook me up. I was really upset and angry for the mercifully short rest of the day.
Where am I going with this? Well, what I realized on my way home from the hearing was just how disappointed I was not to have been elected. I was looking forward to all the new opportunities for change in this system, and in my own life. I guess I could be thankful that I am being spared from another bureaucratic nightmare (as I understand the Central Committee occasionally can be). But I loved running for office and fantasizing about all the interesting ways that the local party could be better, and its a let-down to not even have those to conjure. The stupidity of this hearing made me want to do more and feel sad that I won't have this opportunity this time.
4 comments:
Don't let it be the last time, yo.
Here's my problem: I kvetch (there's a word I won't have used back in Cleveland) and complain about local politics, but I do NOTHING to change it. Hyde Park has 2 horrible alderwomen. Machine-obliging panderers. One recently removed a bus stop to "restore a parking spot lost to the community." That's right ONE parking spot. So a bus stop, for a bus that hundreds use each day, was removed. It was later restored when someone called her on her bone-headness. It turns out she did it because she felt "disrespected" by the process because she wasn't consulted when the bus stop was put in. ARGH! My point: you freakin' got out there to do something, I just fumed and grumbled and psht and kvetched. You rock.
I completely agree with Steve. It's people like you who give the system a chance to work. And it's been great fun to follow your run. Get'em next time!
Also, there are a ton of ways to get involved and help improve the local political scene without being on the central committee. In fact, being on the central committee is a really frustrating, indirect way to do that.
You can get on the state central committee no problem, and then find a local way to stay active, build support for your next run, and be distracted from the frustrations of your job.
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