November 8 was all about elections this year. Our new premier handily won her seat in the Legislative Assembly and will no doubt sleep much better tonight. Failure to win her election would have been profoundly embarrassing and one wonders what it might have done to her career. In the US, the vaunted Red Tsunami did not materialize as hoped although the Republicans did take the House and may yet take the Senate. Whatever the success of this or that candidate, we should be grateful that enough of our fellow citizens are willing to put their lives on hold and their reputations on the line to ensure, aside from shenanigans, a modicum of democracy. After the hurly burly of sometimes strident campaigns, our views of the politics of an individual candidate should be set aside in thanking them for giving us that grace.
In the spirit of that grace, don’t be like Archie! Archie Bunker on Politics
I say this based on my own forays into electoral politics. Twice I ran for school board trustee and twice I was soundly rejected by the voting public. One might think that such rejection would diminish my self-confidence, but the experiences were entertaining enough that I suffered nary a scratch to my ego.
In the early 1990’s, Alberta was going through a period of retrenchment after years of profligate government spending. The local, mostly progressive, school board had invited parents to make presentations about how the financial cutbacks from the government were destroying education. In my presentation I prepared charts showing how the per pupil cost of education on an inflation adjusted basis was correlated to the price of oil. The pupil-teacher ratio had not changed significantly during the time that I had charted so I concluded that the extra money was going into administration which did little for my children’s education. That was as far as I got. My microphone was cut off and I was shown the door.
Shortly after this, a friend decided that the best thing we could do was to run for school board and invited me to join he and four others. We ran as a loose coalition on a back-to-basics platform and the experience of a cut off microphone primed my response to him. We wanted to inject some options into the curriculum with an emphasis on industrial trades education, literacy, numeracy, history and geography (rather than social studies), and parental choices in educational styles (uniforms, traditional learning, girls/boys only schools etc.) The provincial government had ended support for kindergarten, and we proposed to fully fund it for any parents who agreed to use a third-party literacy program to teach their kids to read. For this we were publicly called “Nazis” and “fascists”.
The experience was eye-opening, and we got into all kinds of hot water with one of the local newspapers whose editorial page accused us of wanting to take over the education system to inject Christianity into it. This accusation was repeated at an editorial meeting to which we were invited, and we responded by saying that we simply wanted to ensure that all kids could read when they left grade twelve. We pointed out that it was odd that a business premised on people who could read should be opposed to our goals.
School board elections are notorious for low voter turnout and with over 7,000 employees, the school board-approved candidates had a 25,000-vote lead on us (employees plus family). A turnout of 30,000 voters was normal so our chances of winning were limited. Rather than raise and spend a lot of money, our strategy was to work hard for publicity and name recognition. It turns out that we were champs at getting publicity. The friend who brought me into the venture was from a locally famous newspaper family and he understood the buttons to push and the chains to pull. We were interviewed by national newspapers and cable news networks, and we responded to their invited but unfounded attacks with guest editorials and a flurry of press releases.
In one interview, I recounted that my son had been so shabbily treated in elementary school that “it was better that he had been strapped rather than forced to endure the prolonged torture that was meted out to him”. When the article was printed and my picture was on the front page of the national newspaper, I read it aloud to my family with considerable pride. When I got to the part about wishing my son had gotten the strap, I looked over nervously in his direction and wondered at the strange look he was giving me.
I think our undoing came when our leader suggested publicly that we were open to reinstituting the strap. That caused no little stir among the women in our group, and I had to answer some pointed questions from my wife. “Just kidding!” didn’t seem to mollify anyone and we crashed and burned spectacularly. But I would do it again in a heartbeat because it was such fun.
My second brush with electoral hubris came when my son in grade twelve was offered extra marks in his socials class if he ran for School Board trustee. Someone thought it would be cute if Daddy ran as well and thus my second tilt at an impossible windmill was born. We did indeed become a minor news item and I was able to get the “better to strap him” story into another news article. This time my son was part of the interview, and I was forced to tone down some of the embellishments.
Alone, I couldn’t attract press coverage, but my son was a favourite of the press corps and spoke with some regularity to the French language outlets. It was humbling and my biggest fear was that he would get more votes than I which was sufficient incentive for me to work hard on my campaign. Not hard enough apparently as I was easily trounced and, conveniently, I don’t remember whether my son beat my vote count. No doubt he did and has been very kind to his old man.
My opponents in the ward in which I ran were a wonderful group of people, however, and we had a lot of laughs together at the various candidate forums. Once again, I was attacked for my Nazi tendencies and my scary views about testing kids to determine their literacy and numeracy. During one of the more egregious attacks on my character at a public forum, my fellow aspirants came to my support making the whole experience worth the effort. I was very grateful to them.
So, what is the point of all this? I think it is possible to disagree with the politics of candidates standing for election without calling their parentage into question or impugning their intelligence. Better than calling them an idiot, just say, “I don’t agree with a thing that person says but I am grateful that he/she was willing to step up to the microphone and say it.” We will know that our civilization is over when an election is held, and no one is willing to participate in it.