Fear and Loathing, 2008

(With great appreciation to the late Hunter S. Thompson and his book “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”)

Reader, the conversion from blogger to politician is not easy. There are some important things to learn. Just this week I learned the important lesson that if you don’t want your posterior kicked real hard you’ve got to keep it covered.

This all started a few weeks back. It was that weekend in early June when the thermometer hit triple digits. The maveness and I were gathering signatures for my petitions at the farmers market at Forest Hill Park. At ten o’clock it was already over 90 degrees, the sun was beating down unbearably and this maven made the careless mistake of leaving home without it (a bottle of water, that is). I was hot; I was dizzy; I was grumpy (even grumpier than usual). A woman asked me for my opinion on charter schools.

Well, beloved reader, you know that I endorsed the Patrick Henry charter school on these very pages. What you might not know is that on that dastardly hot Saturday in the park, I knew that the Richmond school board had already approved the charter application of the Patrick Henry Initiative. I figured that the charter school issue was a fait accompli and I really wanted to talk about the 1200 or so elementary school students in the Fourth District of Richmond who would not benefit from the Patrick Henry School. So, I gave the woman a rather weak politician-like answer.

The next thing I know, a friend emailed me to say I had to address a posting on our local news blog, Hills and Heights. I went and read the thing. The woman in the park, who I now learned was named Common Sense Mom, challenged me to explain my views on charter schools and explain why I would oppose charter schools in general yet support the Patrick Henry charter. Now, if I had been acting as a politician rather than as the lawyer I was trained to be, I would have ducked this thing with some glib language and all would have been well. But no! I fired off a multi-paragraph treatise on charter schools and public schools in Richmond. (If you are interested, you can see my foolish prose on Hills and Heights as comment number 23). Well, Common Sense Mom and her friends Jennifer C. and S. Martin started kicking hard at my unprotected bottom. It has taken me almost a week to put out that fire.

So, I am learning.

Communicating as a politician is very difficult. As you know, trusted reader, I usually write a subject to death. If it takes me four typed pages to express myself, so be it. You can’t do that as a politician. You’ve got to condense everything down to about thirty seconds of writing. Believe me, for this maven to say anything in thirty seconds is darn near impossible. But the experts say that you can’t keep a voter’s attention for more than thirty seconds so you have to get your message across short and sweet. So, there’ll be no more analyzing issues for the maven. From now on it’s shoot from the hip.

If you haven’t been keeping track there are now five people running for the fourth district seat on the school board. It had been six, but two weren’t able to submit 125 valid signatures and their names were not put on the ballot. Yesterday, another candidate emerged. I assume that because his name is not on the ballot he will have to stage a write-in campaign.

Reader, this is insanity! Why would anyone invest their time, effort and money to get elected to a position that pays about one thousand dollars per week? I figure that if I am elected and spend about twenty five hours per week doing the job, I will be working at an hourly rate less than any job I’ve had since I was a junior in college.

But, nobody ever accused this maven of acting intelligently. Throughout this campaign, I’ve got to continually remind myself that I am doing this for the children.

I expect that I’ll be writing more soon to test out some new ideas. Reader, thank you for being tolerant of my spending so little of my time communicating with you.