I’ve been interested in politics since I was 6 years old. When Ronald Reagan was re-elected against Walter Mondale, I sent him a letter. I told him that if I had been old enough to vote, I would not have voted for him, but I hoped he proved me wrong and was a good president anyway. He sent me a signed picture, but he failed to prove me wrong.
When I was 10, I sat next to Congressman (later NJ Governor) Jim Florio when he spoke at my south jersey synagogue, and, as a crushed sophomore in high school, had dragged my mom to what was supposed to be the 1993 victory party for his gubernatorial re-election. I started Students With A Voice (SWAV) a national progressive but non-partisan student activist organization that at one point had members in 26 states. I give this background not to say, "look at all I’ve done", but to place what I’m doing now, and asking you to do, in context.
I’ve been involved in democratic politics ever since, from being a white house intern and Issues and Activism Director of the GW college democrats, to volunteering for Democratic campaigns while in law school in MA, to volunteering for Obama in Chicago when he ran for Senate. I won the DCCC fundraising contest to attend the 2004 Democratic convention with support from the Daily Kos community and have been an active reader and occasional poster here for upwards of 4 years and have a spiffy 4 digit UID to prove it.
I’ve been so involved in Democratic politics because I believe passionately in the importance of democratic (small d) government, and that as a community we need to help each other have the basic educational and material resources to explore our potential and make the most of our lives.
I’ve often tended to focus on national (and sometimes state) issues, because I tend to be a global thinker and look at how everything is connected. But lately I have been getting more and more involved in local issues. Around 2 years ago I read an archived article on the Courier Post website about the insidious practice of pay to play. For those of you who don’t know, pay to play is the costly and all too common practice of rewarding large campaign contributors with even larger no-bid government contracts. In any other context, it would be considered bribery. But in New Jersey politics, it is business as usual. I worked with friends and neighbors to get a strong ban on pay to play enacted in my home town of Washington Township. We had to get 1800 signatures, more than enough to get the issue before voters as a referendum, before town council would act.
This confirmed my impression that the local Democratic Party, which has total control in my town and many of its neighbors, was not very democratic. As a committed Democrat, I was not sure what to do. The party that has been my life long home was not living up to its ideals. I decided to run for office, to try to bring democracy back to the Democratic Party.
I decided to run for mayor.
They say there is not a Democratic or Republican way to pick up trash.
However, there IS a progressive way to govern. It means open honest transparent government. It means building consensus in the community, not imposing a vision on the town. It means not kowtowing to a county democratic party that seems to be more about rewarding contributors and amassing power than about doing right by the people.
Local government isn’t as sexy as the latest Obama vs Hillary diary, but it is crucial to the future success (or lack thereof) of our experiment in democratic self government.
We need to be the change we want to see in the world, the change we want to see in the Democratic Party and the CHANGE we want to see in our home towns.
If you agree, please contribute, both to the campaign and to the conversation. Or better yet, run for local office too.
PS: This is not a hit and run diary, but I need to meet with a potential council candidate running mate at 9PM eastern. There is quite a story behind why we need a new one. Trish, a former Ed Rendell advisor, is still on board and is a huge asset. I will jump on the computer as soon as a I return to respond to comments/questions.