Cry me a river
There’s something funny about watching politicos squirm as we get down to crunch time. In today’s T&G Shawn Suttner brought to light a conspiracy afoot in the freshly overhauled Worcester election office. Apparently the decision has been made not to identify incumbents as such on next weeks primary ballots, upsetting challengers who were hoping they could simply toss around ‘we need a change in City Hall’ rhetoric in place of actual, well thought out ideas.
Look kids, I can criticize with the best of them. But the idea is to follow up your whining with something of substance; yelling “I support PILOT!” just doesn’t cut it. If we’re to be honest here it’s margins, not the charter and certainly not principal, worrying the candidates. I’m hearing 13,000 for voter turnout from some of the most reliable political bookmakers. With this many contenders and this few actual ideas, a win as a newbie is only possible if you can find enough angry old ladies, angry at being old and hope to redirect some of that wrath at the evil empire. But you can only cut a cake so many ways and some of the new kids don’t have much to work with once you get past the fresh faces and most people know that.
This is only a disservice to the poorly informed sub-cretins who in a perfect world wouldn’t be able to figure how to work a paper ballot and marker in the first place; and of course their rhetoric spewing, savior of the moment. Sorry, but Rushford’s right on this one. We need more voters and we need informed voters; not doing your homework is not my problem and it certainly shouldn’t be the only thing a newcomer has to work with.
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7 Responses to “Cry me a river”
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>We need more voters and we need informed
>voters; not doing your homework is not my
>problem and it certainly shouldn’t be the only
>thing a newcomer has to work with.
I agree with you in general; anyone voting who can’t identify the incumbents isn’t paying attention, and that person should do the responsible thing and not vote.
On the other hand, the plain sense of the ordinance seems to be, “Incumbents should be identified on the ballot.” Not ID’ing them on this particular ballot may be in accord with the letter of the law, but I think it defies the spirit.
It does, I don’t question that. The problem then becomes a matter of charter change to better reflect reality; which we don’t have enough active voters to pull off. It’s a catch 22 of sorts and unfortunately the law favors those with the least interest in actually fixing anything but who are interested in maintaining a comfortable setting to complain simply for the sake of complaining.
Hey Brendan,
Hey Brendan,
Just want to say that I enjoy your blog, even though you dubbed one of my columns “drivel.”
Give a girl a break _ I thought it was kind of cute and light-hearted. Also, if you criticize me in the future you might want to spell my name right _ it’s Dianne with 2 NNs.
Best, Dianne W.
Also, you spelled Shaun Sutner’s name wrong, too. Not to nitpick or anything
Ah, if only the informed among us had the right to pick and choose who gets to vote.
Whoever forged the typo-laden comments complaining about typos has a great sense of humor.