Leadership gets to the heart of the question. 3 syllables, easy enough to say, but elusive and even fleeting to find in practice. Saturday morning, people came to find it, to see it in the flesh. As one Republican put it to me later that day, in hearing the candidates dialog he was expecting to find a compelling reason to change commissioners. He expected the challengers to make a passionate case that something with the current commission had gone horribly wrong. He wanted to hear the compelling reason the commissioners should be ridden out of town on a rail, perhaps trailing tar and feathers. You know, a reason akin to the situation facing us with Obama in the presidential race.
If you haven’t listened to the 4 streams of commissioner candidates answering questions (Del Schwab, Larry Ross, Robert Rowland, John Shipper), now would be a good time to do so. If you listen closely you’ll be able to pick out several factual problems in the New-Plains reportage of the event. As an aside, I like this form of presentation that removes all input — crowd, answer sequence, moderator influence — extraneous to the candidates’ speech itself. All that extra theater can confuse some people.
At the end of the meeting on Saturday, none of the mudballs thrown by challengers and their supporters over the past few months turn out to have stuck. No bad decisions, no smoking guns, no graft, no corruption, no skullduggery, no mismanagement, no financial impropriety, no bad faith, no conflicts of interest, and no failures of any leadership duties. None of the innuendo the left so liberally distribute on the web and at public meetings has panned out. Not a single nugget left in the pan after all the swirling mud drains out.
Turns out the commissioners already were transparent and they already had been facilitating various venues for citizen input to substantive government. They’ve upheld statutory financial requirements, they’ve balanced the books, they’ve had open doors to hear every public and private interest group. They have ongoing relations with every subordinate governmental organization, every department head, and every citizen in the county.
So then, what complaints did the challengers bring yesterday? What fuels their passion and makes them rise from the status quo of normal life to seek public office now?
After taking out all the unsubstantiated mud from the mix, we’re left with:
- an incumbent leader who might not be too comfortable blowing his own horn but who can lead a public meeting like a symphony concert master, and
- challenger “I’m a nice enough guy, here is my phone number, call me,” and
- challenger salad spinner throwing off “we the peoples” and other conservative sound bites like water droplets, and
- an incumbent leader who may not be terribly smooth in front of an audience but who inspires confidence in his understanding and control of county finance.
As for the Republican gentleman who came looking for an answer to the challenger question, using Commissioner Schwab’s phrase, “Finding none,” he found his answer.