Election Results

Sara and I have been friends since we both moved to San Francisco in the seventies. We shared a couple of houses in different parts of the city before she packed up and headed back East again. She settled into Brooklyn and spent years in an old warehouse full of artists. Then, she decided it was time for a change, so she took a job in Seattle. When the Northwest proved inhospitable, Sara made another transcontinental move. She took a volatile job with a real estate developer in a little town fifty miles up the Hudson from New York City.

From the beginning, she said she made the move because she'd fallen in love with Beacon. She put down roots in record time. She bought an old fixer-upper and dove into the life of the community. It wasn't long before she was a well known arts administrator on Main Street.

That didn't surprise me at all. Sara is outgoing, personable, and she loves to socialize. What did surprise me was that after about a year, she decided to run for City Council in this town of 14,000. Electoral politics wasn't something she'd done before.

Sara didn't win her first election, but she ran well. In the couple of years that followed, she organized house parties for an insurgent congressional candidate, took on the presidency of the Beacon Arts Community Association, and co-chaired the Beacon Comprehensive Plan Committee. Given all of that, to my outsider's eye, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that she would win her district seat. And she did. Earlier this month, she beat each of her two opponents by a margin of two to one.

Talking with her last weekend brought my Emeryville political forays to mind. It also made me think about my brother-in-law, Ciro, who has served multiple terms on the Berkeley Heights School Board, and about the various classmates whose submissions to the Wesleyan alumni news have so often included mention of holding local office.

What is it about small towns that brings out the citizen-politician in so many of us?

It's easy to say that it's all about scale. You can become known in a community of ten, twelve, or fourteen thousand people without much trouble. But I actually think it's more about impact and investment. In a small town, you can make things happen. Nothing is theoretical. It's all real and it's all personal. It's the park that takes the place of the empty lot on the next block; it's the speed bumps that slow down traffic in front of your house.

Thanks to Netflix, Bob and I have been watching the HBO series Deadwood. We're about halfway through season two. The mining camp is on the verge of being annexed to South Dakota. In order to enhance their chances, the unsavory bunch of miscreants who have congregated in the gold fields decide it would be wise to set themselves up as Health Commissioner, Safety Inspector, Medical Examiner, Sheriff, and Mayor.

What the writers have nicely developed is how the pretense gives way to a real, if self-interested, assumption of the roles they've taken on. All of a sudden, often without meaning to, each of those who have assumed a title finds that he is rising to the job. Between bouts of drunkenness, Charlie Utter levies fines for fire hazards. Even he is shocked by his new-found sense of responsibility. Much against his better judgment, Seth Bullock begins to draw up plans for waste disposal.

In small towns like Emeryville, Beacon, Berkeley Heights--even Deadwood--you feel the need as much as you see it. From there it's only a small step to fixing the problem. You might start out thinking someone else should do it, but when no one does, you know you must. Pretty soon, you're one of the city mothers or fathers.

I had my chance at becoming a "city mother" in Emeryville, but I left before that second election--the one I could have won. The scale of Oakland is too much for me. A city of 400,000 is nothing like a town of 7,000. City Council members in Oakland aren't citizen-politicians the way they are in Beacon or Emeryville or Berkeley Heights. They're politicians, purely and absolutely.