Pre-election musings

Election season can be an exciting time. There’s an electricity as ideas are exchanged, possibilities are discussed; voters get energized and the community achieves a level of engagement that happens all too infrequently.
On the other hand, there’s the vitriol which we could do without–the fire-spitting supporters who deride their candidate’s opponents with distaste and disgust, pointing fingers of fury.
So far, this year, the candidates themselves have remained respectful toward each other–despite obvious differences in opinion. We understand it’s always uncomfortable when someone wants your job and particularly so when that effort plays out publicly, but such is the life of elected officials.
We elect them for their ideas, their skill, their experience. Hopefully, they’re statesmen and women as well. We’ll find out in the coming weeks as Election Day nears and the candidates vie for votes.
At their root, elections are competitions and those participating–and their teams–want to win or they wouldn’t be involved. Sometimes that brings out the best in folks. Sometimes, not so much.
Monday night, the Orange County Chamber of Commerce hosted its first candidate forum at Unionville Elementary School.
Candidates for commonwealth attorney, sheriff and the District 2 seat on the board of supervisors answered questions submitted by audience members–many of whom were supporters of those up on the stage.
We got a better feel for each of the candidates Monday night, but it’s hard to capture their platforms and their big picture ideas in three-minute summaries and one-minute question responses. (We’re not faulting the chamber or its format. In fact they did a fantastic job of presenting dozens of pertinent questions to the various candidates over the three-hour event. The forum is a good snapshot of each of the candidates.)
Still, it’s clear the best “politicking” the candidates can do will be on individual, grassroots levels with voters. Looking around the audience of about 150 or so Monday night, we doubt there were many there who were genuine “undecideds.” We saw a lot of familiar faces in the crowd and hope future forums bring out more folks looking to learn more about the candidates.
For the most part, the audience-submitted questions were appropriate and issue-related. Some were pointed and clearly designed to solicit specific responses from certain candidates, but nothing crossed the line. We hope that trend continues.
Elections should be about issues and offices. Certainly, people are involved, and we can’t separate them from the equation. After all, they’re the ones working those issues in those offices. But too often we get caught up in our emotions during elections. The energy elections create is sometimes attributed to our strong emotional feelings for the candidates we support or the ones we don’t. Still, we must temper those emotions with civility and recognize we are all part of the same community–each wanting what’s best for the community as a whole–whether we’re running for office or not.
We trust our candidates will continue their respectful campaigns and hope they encourage their supporters to do the same. Certainly, there are folks who just don’t like certain candidates and they’re not shy about sharing that. Others are equally effusive about their candidate. We’d just like to remind them all that in between those two types are most of the rest of us–eager to learn as much about the candidates as we can with the clarity of our own eyes–not the jaded or rose-colored glasses of others.