A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
This column originally was published as "Bully pulpit electoral vistas" on October 20, 2011 – a year after the 2010 Floyd County elections, and just prior to the most recent round of city elections that same year, during which Jeff Gahan was elected mayor, and city council returned to the third floor with a 7-1-1 Democratic majority.
Since then, city council has changed dramatically. Now, instead of the Gang of Four’s obstructionist council saying “no” and accomplishing nothing, Pat McLaughlin’s rubber stamp council says “yes” to the mayor – and accomplishes just as much.
Then there's the Floyd County Democratic Party, which hasn’t changed at all. In county elections on Tuesday, the FCDP was unceremoniously handed its ass on a stained microwave platter salvaged from the late, lamented Sammy O’s.
The FCDP managed a grand total of one win in contested races, and actually doubled down on its losing percentage in big ticket contests for the Indiana House and Senate. The FCDP’s only apparent strategy for county elections came down to getting out the vote, and what votes came out, and were not squelched by Floyd County’s legendary propensity to administratively out-banana Third World quasi-republics with flagrant voting irregularities more common to East Timor than West Endia, were cast against the Democrats.
If you’ve lived here any length of time, you already know the script for what comes next. The FCDP retreats to its municipal lair, licks its wounds, looks longingly for inspiration to the lunatic conservative political ravings of noted policy maker Walt Disney, seeks the re-enthronement of an increasingly isolated and paranoid sitting mayor and his bored, pliant council – and regresses even further into the gloaming of irrelevance and ultimate collapse.
But don’t you think it’s time to reintroduce progressive thought to New Albany, where it is best situated to be relevant, as principled counterpoint to both the spluttering cave men of the GOP and the FCDP's unreconstructed Dixiecrat cadre?
I do, so let’s talk. The column is reprinted as originally written, and so the progressive platform planks are due for revision and augmentation. Some of my endorsements in 2011, mercifully omitted here, are the source of enduring embarrassment. However, I strongly believe that my conclusion remains cogent. It's all about awareness, and introducing these ideas to the debate. It's a process for right now.
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October 20, 2011
The general election approaches. Just last spring, I harbored a middling desire to contest it. This notion was rendered moot in the primary, where I finished fifth in a field of six and failed to advance.
Que sera, sera.
Given the unconventional nature of my campaign (not one red, white or blue cent was expended), it was highly encouraging to receive more than 1,300 votes, even if they were not enough to finish in the top three. An adage holds that the first time out, building name recognition is the goal, and so I’d say my first-ever run was a very cost-effective introduction to the electorate.
As for what it means in the future tense, fifty-one years have given me no firm idea of what I intend to do when I grow up. The only truly reliable deity is serendipity, and life is what continues to happen while we’re busy making other plans. Some variety of community service, politically speaking, may yet occur before I’m finished.
Right now, I’d rather sell (and drink) lots of Progressive Pints.
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While not entirely unexpected, perhaps the most revealing aspect of the primary campaign for me was attending Democratic Party events, and realizing in sadness and disgust that with only occasional exceptions, the higher placed the local Democratic Party power broker, the lesser chance he or she holds any beliefs remotely approximating the Democratic Party’s platform as it is now, as opposed to as it was back in pre-LBJ times.
As a leftist doomed to inhabit this benighted shard of riverside floodplain, it felt like a bad time travel film – Planet of the Dixiecrats, perhaps – wherein an entire supposed ruling caste stands stock still, refusing to read the memo, as decades tick past and the remainder of the world proceeds inevitably into the future.
Uninformed stasis makes perfect sense as a Republican worldview, as Dave Matthews’ career as GOP party chairman so tellingly attests, but the fact that the same reasoning girds the crumbling remnants of the Democratic Party’s ward-heeling machine, now reduced to a late-model station wagon suspended atop concrete blocks, tells us exactly why eight years of an 8-1 council “majority” has yielded almost nothing except missed opportunities.
And so, I might have sought an at-large seat as an independent, and might yet, but the reason I didn’t was the immensely entertaining opportunity to glide into Democratic strongholds and make statements like this:
Let’s begin by speaking aloud the unthinkable: I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and I will again in 2012. Terms like left, liberal and progressive don’t offend me.
They describe me.
While campaigning for council, it’s my intention to fight for the relevant principles and values of the Democratic Party, and to apply them to our situation, right here in New Albany.
New Albany’s overarching need is to fight the good fight for greater local determination. The Indy-centric budgeting system we have now is inefficient and infected with malicious Republican ideology. Cutting essentials in education, public safety and social services is madness.
Accordingly, it’s my core belief that current Republican policies are the problem, not the solution, and I don’t much care if Ed Clere and Ron Grooms and Steve Stemler and Tony Bennett and Mitch Daniels don’t like it, because they’re Republicans – even Stemler – and we’re not.
It was worth it just to watch the unreconstructed party elders cringe like vampires at the garlic buffet.
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On October 22, it will be seven years to the day of the very first NAC blog posting. In the course of almost 5,000 more posts since then, we’ve never stopped learning, and from this amazing, ongoing, always edifying discussion, my 2011 campaign planks largely were drawn:
Human dignity has no price tag; we must re-animate the Human Rights Commission.
“No” votes aren’t leadership. Council members must be open to new ideas, willing to learn, and able to adapt to changing realities.
We must pursue optimum localization of the economy for a more sustainable economic foundation, with more money staying in New Albany, and greater economic self-sufficiency.
Economic development funds are for economic development. They are not sewer rate subsidies, bribes for wealthy multi-national corporations, or meant for the oligarch protection society, i.e., One Southern Indiana.
Economic localization is bottom-up, not top-down. Enhanced cooperation between existing entities like New Albany First, Develop New Albany and the Urban Enterprise Association is welcomed insofar as their activities reflect grassroots needs.
Environmental restoration and sustainability are fundamental to resolving longstanding problems with storm water and the sewer system.
Sustainable green initiatives harmonize with the goal of remaking the city and its streets into a place primarily intended for the use of people, not their cars. We must maximize the advantages of urban living according to what these are, not how suburbanites think they should be.
Progressive, family-friendly neighborhood policies also come from the bottom up. Many current problems result from generations of bad remedies and design flaws. We must rethink these, plan, explore cause and effect, recognize inter-relatedness and repair them.
We must enforce ordinances. All proceeds from enforcement should be kept here to help fund further improvements, which include mandatory rental property inspections.
No tolls! The Ohio River Bridges Project is a multi-billion dollar transportation boondoggle disproportionately burdening Hoosier small businesses, Hoosier workers and Hoosier families.
Slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, the terms of our civic dialogue continue to change, and although I lost in May, these platform planks live on. To as great an extent as possible, and admittedly with imperfection, my candidate endorsements in the forthcoming general election were made with these positions in mind. Granted, not all the winners will embrace them, but for once, they’ll at least be aware of them.
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