Got up early today; am planning on taking M to school and then coming back to take J for his colonoscopy. Poor man - he said he might not be able to be that far away from a bathroom, or he'd come with me.
While I was washing my hair, I had a sudden thought.
I'm going to run for elected office.
(I have a lot of hair, so I had a lot of time to think about this in the shower.)
After reading the latest news about who's taken money from Abramoff, how pork is attached to bills, how congressmen vote for bills having hardly read them, or read just the summaries.... hell, I can do a better job than that.
I'm crazy, you say? Welll, yes, but evidently 18% of the American people will have a mental disorder at some point in their lives, so at least I'm representative of the population, you know?
Sordid past - yup. So what? I definitely learned from my mistakes.
Kids are awake - gotta go get them ready to go. What do you think?
mostly pointless meanderings
Friday, November 18, 2005
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3 comments:
Start small (i.e. local), and also bite the bullet and get involved in a major party. Even if you want to run as an independent eventually, working with one of the big two will get you useful contacts and allow you to learn the ropes when it's not your ass on the line.
Another think you should start to think about is funding. Who will you get it from and how will you get them to give it to you are the main points to consider.
Overall I would reccomend putting in time in local party organizations for a few years and then going for a school board spot after Moira's been in school for a year or two (that way you can dodge questions about your qualifications by saying your credentials are from raising a child).
You've really thought this through! Considering it yourself?
Rationally and logistically, you make a lot of sense. However, I've not got my heart set on this - so I think I'm going to continue to be the oddball independent, and if I can't get anywhere that way, so be it. (It's not like I don't have several other careers that I'd really enjoy; that's always been my problem. ;) I'm too eclectic.)
Once the kids are a little older, however, I would like to get a lot more involved.
What's the political scene out where you are? Or have you had the energy to get into it yet? ;)
I've not really thought about running for anything except in the abstract. For the moment, I've kind of got my heart set on being a cop and it occured to me that when I'm done with that (either through being too old and broken down to keep up with it or through burnout) it wouldn't be the worst launch pad for some sort of elected office. Mostly I thought of all that stuff off the top of my head.
The political scene out here is somewhat odd. Statewide there's a split along the Cascades. On the West side of the mountains it's by and large pretty liberal and urban, on the East side it's pretty conservative and rural. Seattle gets even more complicated. Seattle is located in King County, which includes a number of other small cities (referred to collectively as the Greater Seattle Area, and referred to by me hereafter as the GSA). Here the East/West schizophrenia shows itself in small. On the West side of the lakes you have Seattle and other bastions of serious pinko liberalism. On the Eastside you have Bellevue, Kirkland and Redmond which are sort of yuppie strongholds and thusly lean to the right because none of them want to pay taxes. In terms of the issues around the state, the big ones seem to focus mostly on transportation. Seattle can be pretty congested traffic-wise, and a number of the major routes through the GSA are in dire need of maintenance/upgrading (mainly the SR 99 Viaduct downtown which is falling apart and will collapse killing hundreds if not thousands of people the next time there's a bigg-ish earthquake and will collapse anyway all on its own if it's left without repairs for long enough, the SR 520 floating bridge across Lake Washington which is reportedly also in dire need of repairs for the sake of safety and which could do with a few more lanes while they're at it, and I-5 in downtown which really needs to be improved so that it is less confusing/dangerous). Nobody seems to want to pay for these roads.
One recent development is that the Monorail project was finally killed this year. Seattle has had this ridiculous idea to build an elevated monorail as a mass transit solution for years now. It was voted into existence and maintained entirely via ballot initiative, and was only killed this year because the SMP revealed that instead of building a comprehensive mass transit system that would be paid for within a decade, they would build a crap system that didn't really go anywhere very useful and it would take 50 or more years to pay off. When people got pissed (the response of the SMP board was to hire a consultant for some tremendous amount of money to "turn the project around")and the mayor pulled their building permits, they also revealed that it would take several MORE years to pay off the debt they incurred for studies, advertising and lame computer animations of the monorail (the whole deal was funded by a 10% excise on all vehicle registrations in Seattle, quite a pain in the pocketbook for the individual and quite a lot of money). To add to the drama, the Chairman of the SMP turns out to have been planning the route as much as possible to benefit himself (he owns a lot of land downtown), and there was only ONE bidder for the whole project.
Anyway, that's just a little bit of a picture of local politics here. I would kind of like to get involved (at the very least because I would like to worm my way up into the belly of the Democratic Party to implement some ideas I have), but so far have not found the time or the passion to do so.
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