Karen and I walked into town this morning to vote in the special election to fill a state representative seat vacated when Joe Booth won an earlier special election to replace a state senator who passed away. Maybe I need to make a diagram?At the polls, we found our local state senator, Republican Gary Simpson (Booth's new seat is west of us), and Tim Willard, who I think is a leader in the Democratic Party, chatting together. That's Gary on the left and Tim on the right.
It was nice to chat with them and it was a good opportunity to register a complaint.
We've had plenty of attention from the political parties leading up to this. It was a short, but intense campaign. I took in one of the two candidate debates that were held. And we've been getting multiple robo calls for a while now. From both sides and from a few outside groups as well. We are, frankly, tired of getting calls.
Both gentlemen accepted the complaint with good grace. In fact, they said we were not the only ones to complain.
But chatting with them also reminded me of one of the things I like about where we live. There are still, among the leadership of the Democrats and Republicans, kind and friendly people who work well together, even as rivals.
To be sure, there are also jerks and blowhards, but they tend to be on the fringes. When you get one on one with folks, it's still generally nice.
This is why Gary still gets my vote, most of the time. And it is one of the reasons why I voted (and I think Karen did as well), for Rob Robinson in this special election. Rob's mom is a Republican. In fact she was a former candidate for Congress for the Republicans But they are of what I think of as the Neither-Right-Wing-Nor-Left-Wing branch of Delaware politics. They are interested in public service.
I think that's a good thing and I hope we can keep it alive through the dark times we're seeing lately.
2 comments:
Mike, Really well put. This is something that I have been struggling with as of late. My fear with the hype around elections and the continual campaigning that happens in modern era politics is that the whole point of the election is to put the person that you feel represents you (or more importantly your district)in office to make the decisions and voice the opinions of the people that are represented. I quite frankly am trying to be completely non-partisan. I would like to listen to the candidate - take what they say at face value, weigh that against the issues they will face and determine which best represents my family, my area and ultimately my state. I want non-partisan because the fact of the matter is few of us walk the party line to the tee. We each have an opinion and we need to focus on the issues facing our area and vote with that as our directive.
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