Running for office has been a revelatory experience. Independent of the results, I wanted to share my thoughts, so I’m posting this before election results come out.
Gratitude
Firstly, thank you. Yes, you, dear reader. Thank you, every single person who engaged with me, positively or negatively, during the campaign. The reason I ran for the Board was because I thought (and still think) I have skills and experience that would be useful as a trustee. But there were a lot of secondary, more personal considerations. Local politics is the lifeblood of our democracy, and I wanted to play my part in it. I also wanted to try to do something rather than complain about things. Finally, I wanted to embed myself into this wonderful community. Thanks to all of you who engaged with me, I was able to do all of that.
I want to particularly highlight the kindness of (relative) strangers. People who reached out by text and email and Facebook and letting me know that they didn’t just support what I was standing for, they supported me. Thank you. You know who you are.
Finally, a major thank you to my wife, the most impressive member of my family. You have done so much, and you had to deal with a sitting member of the Board (and a candidate) making public insinuations about you for no fault of yours. You’ll be even more relieved than I will after the results are in!
What it takes – logistics
One of the most revelatory things was just how much needs to be done to run, if you do things by the book, even if you’re only using your own money. First, you need to collect 25 ballot signatures and submit them at the county office. In and of itself, that wasn’t too painful. The real fun comes after that:
- You need to get a federal EIN for your campaign.
- You then need to file a federal form 8871, which designates you as a political organization under section 527.
- You need to set up a depository bank account for the campaign. Amusingly, at Bank of America, in order to do this you need to file state form D-1…which is the form you use to report your depository account information to the state. So you have to file an incomplete D-1 lacking that information, open the account, and then refile an amended D-1. Logical!
- You also need to designate a campaign chair and treasurer. For me, this was easy1.
- You need to submit a form C-1 to report all contributions, including your own. In other words, the way you fund your own campaign by the book is to write a check to your new committee2, deposit it in your new depository account, and then report the amount on a C-1. You would have to do this every time you add money to the account.
- You then need to use the oddly separate NJ e-filing system to report contributions and expenditures, and file at mandatory deadlines (29 days and 11 days pre-election, and 20 days post-election). Fortunately, the system does automatically create the necessary reports for the relevant time frames.
I’ve been dreading the process for transferring back unspent funds from the depository account3 and closing it out. I’m assuming it requires a blood sacrifice of some kind.
My takeaway from all of this is just how many barriers you have to navigate even before you get to the campaigning bit, and how much that might filter out people who get confused or intimidated by all the paperwork. There are very good reasons to mandate strict campaign finance reporting, and I have no idea whether any of these regulations are enforced in practice for small local races. It certainly can’t help in producing candidates across a wide spectrum of people, though. Having gone through it, I admire everyone who has done so.
What it takes – personality
It’s a truism that in local politics, the demos sometimes puts the crazy in democracy4. Honestly, I don’t think this campaign was that bad, but there was a period where it got a little unpleasant. I’m uninterested in re-litigating it, but I found it interesting that quite a few people brought up said unpleasantness as the reason they didn’t participate more in local politics. A few people, admittedly supporters, praised me for not allowing myself to be bullied or intimidated out of running.
While the school board might not be partisan, it is inherently political. The fact that “politics” has become a dirty word is, in my humble opinion, a big part of the decay of civic institutions in the country. Politics is the process by which we arrive at decisions in our self-governing republic. That’s all it is. It isn’t inherently a bad thing. “Taking the politics out of it” is both itself a political position, and also definitionally impossible.
Politics is also a contact sport, and one that requires a thick skin. In my mind, the cardinal sin that a public servant can commit is allowing personal considerations to get in the way of effective and ethical governance. One of my favourite quotes about politics is said to originate from Jesse Unruh5, was also used by Molly Ivins, and was adapted as dialogue in The West Wing. The PG version of it is: “Hey, if you can’t drink their booze, take their money and then vote against them, you don’t belong in this business.” The corollary here is that if you can’t vote with people who were mean to you, or vote against people who were nice to you – if you even allow that to be part of your decision-making process – then you have no business in public office.
As such, I have no issue with people criticizing me for whatever reason, either real or invented. I do have an issue with people bringing my spouse into it, but not to the extent that it would affect my ability to work with them. What I have a real issue with is insinuations that people might refuse to work with me, for supposed reasons of comity. To even hint at that – to hint that your hurt fee-fees are more important than the kids of this entire community – is a complete abrogation of responsibility and a lack of leadership6.
Exhilaration
When you’re in the middle of a campaign, it’s sometimes hard to step back and get some perspective. It’s hard to see the bigger picture, the forest for the trees, whatever metaphor you choose.
But let’s give it a shot.
There are over 13,000 school districts in this country. The emotion, the stress, the drama of the last few months, all of that is being played out thousands of times over, people who will never meet and are completely unaware of each other having parallel experiences.
And then there are races for town councils. Mayoralties. State positions. Federal positions. And then there are all of our non-elected politicians – community organizers, activists, civic leaders. All the capillaries, the veins and arteries, nourishing our body politic. A few of these people become household names, most never will and never will want to, but they’re all fundamentally doing the same thing – politics. Participants in deciding what we’ll do as a community, as a society, a town, a state, a country.
And all of these people – all of us, I can say now – are doing the same thing that people across the world are striving to do. In India, in Brazil, in Europe, everywhere, there are people who have this in common: They stood up. They got involved. Some win, some lose, a few become famous, the vast majority will be forgotten, but they all stood up. They all got into the arena.
And in America, the world’s oldest experiment in self governance, we’re following in the footsteps of the people who stood up and said that there was another way. An imperfect way, thought up by imperfect men, imperfectly executed. But it was different. And through politics, through long generations, we have made it a more perfect union, and we continue to do so every day, and so will those who come after us. We are part of an unbroken legacy, each of us a fibre in the long rope that stretches from 1776 into an unforeseeable future, with similar ropes being woven in other places by other people, all stretching forward into the mists of time.
I hope this thought fascinates you and exhilarates you. I hope that you might feel inspired to join those of us who have stood up. I hope that you will think of politics, not as something to be avoided and disdained, but something that is intrinsic to our heritage as citizens, and that is the way that we will create the future we want to see.
I hope it makes you want to run.
- Me and me! ↩︎
- Again, in my case, I was the committee… ↩︎
- Again, getting my own money back. ↩︎
- Actually, I might be the first person to say it in those words. ↩︎
- Onetime Speaker of the California Assembly. ↩︎
- While we’re at it, paeans to ‘comity’ and ‘working together’ matter to the extent that they allow you to achieve good things. If you unanimously decide to make a bad decision, no amount of self-congratulatory backslapping about ‘coming together’ will make the decision good. ↩︎
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