He may have retired, but unfortunately Karl Rove's lessons live on, and not just in national politics.  His classic maneuver of having candidates stay above the fray while supporters launch attacks on their opponents' patriotism is alive and well in Upstate New York.

As Town of Dryden Democratic Committee Chair, I get to spend a lot of time looking at voter registration and election results looking for trends that might help us win local offices. In my day job, I edit computer books, including some on mapping. I thought I'd combine the two and see what I could find.

Everyone's seen red/blue maps and various purple maps by state, or maybe even by county. For my purposes, though, I wanted to see what those maps looked like within my county, at the election district level, ranging from a few hundred voters to about a thousand.

Ever wonder what the red-blue breakdown inside a mostly blue county might look like?

Like a lot of people here, I've followed national politics compulsively for years. If there was an issue, I had an opinion. If I heard of a new issue, I'd read around until I developed an opinion. National politics seemed like the place to be. Everyone knows something about it, and if you win, you feel like you're making a big difference...

Except, well...

All my talk hasn't made that big a difference. Sure, I've won a few arguments, gotten some nice letters back from legislators, and felt good about what I was standing for. At the same time, though, something was missing. The ideas and conversations were good, but local politics offered a better arena to put those ideas and conversations into effective practice.

General frustration with national politics drove me to do some strange things. While I still followed (and follow) national politics, I got involved with my local Democratic party as a volunteer on a local election. We lost, but the lessons I learned from that loss drove me to start a blog focusing squarely on local issues in Dryden, NY.