[Part III] Campaign Trail: Actually Normal People for Once

Tonight's "do" was sponsored by the Montgomery County Young Republicans, at the American Film Institute's restored Silver Theater.

Believe it or not, this is the first time I have ever been in the place. It's very nice indeed. I like it. If you're going to spend taxpayer money on the arts, this is probably how you want to do it. Then again, I was getting in for free, and I don't know how much it would cost me for a ticket to see a film. However, if I was trying to take a nice date out to a nice theater to catch a really classy film, it would probably be worth whatever they were charging, within reason.

An aside: on the way home, I tried to buy a can of loose-leaf tobacco so I could spend the next week rolling my own cigarettes.. Hey, I am frugal and prefer the taste in any case, plus the endless effort to roll a perfect smoke is a fairly Zen moment perfectly suited to something approximating generating some inner calm. However, overnight, the price has more than doubled. Something is hideously wrong here. I blame Annapolis, probably.

But enough about me: the venue was nice, capable of holding about 200 people in that particular space. The seating was perhaps a bit above half full. There were media in attendance, from both the Post and the Gazette.

The questions were, not surprisingly, often around a lot of issues that would more concern the younger voters. We were asked a lot of things like how we felt about alternative futures of the County liquor establishment. Yet, surprisingly indeed, at least half of the audience were our elder citizens. One nice lady paused from her knitting to ask an exceptionally complex question, difficult to answer, more or less about "even in these scary economic times, what do you intend to do now to conserve energy and the environment, and help save the planet". Not surprisingly, our answers were all over the map. I'd love to give you fair and unbiased coverage, but I have to admit I think I answered well, inarguably better than anyone else, of course, if I may be so modest. Another good question was how do we deal with the fact that the County can keep raising taxes almost infinitely on commercial rental properties, and thus those taxes get passed on to renters, making renting in such places almost unaffordable to most. I suggested that perhaps it was time to revisit the County housing policy, and perhaps give private homeowners more license to rent rooms and operate accessory apartments so long as everything was licensed, inspected, permitted, and all above board... and give these homeowners a tax break (made up in permitting fees within limits, etc.) for helping to create more affordable housing. And for elderly homeowners, they might wind up with free live-in lawn service. And this would create economic pressures for the commercial-rental managers to lower their rents, creating more affordability. Everyone wins, I guess. Would someone like to do a spreadsheet on this? Could be workable.

Really, a lot of good ideas came out all around.

After the meeting, I was really rather surprised and very pleased to meet a lot of nice people, who stopped to chat, some of them "mere voters" (as if there is such a thing) and some of them being organizers and various party officials of various levels of involvement in various levels of the County, State, and even Federal party and government.

Folks, I have to admit, my head was spinning. On the one hand, I was desperate to pass out my sadly underfunded campaign literature which consists of a standard business card. On the other hand, I didn't want to be rude to the nice people who were trying to talk to me. Forgive me, I am very new to this and ideally I would have campaign staff to hand out my fashionably designed picture perfect glossy campaign literature while I schmoozed with the glitterati. But I'm just some poor man from a poor neighborhood trying to put his poor ideas out before anyone who will listen and I haven't yet learned the protocols of the politician. If anyone got one of my cards and wants to send me mail, I'll answer it as best I can.

Oh, yay, I got to shake Councilman Leventhal's hand, even if he was wearing a Navarro sticker on his lapel. No point in being huffy, is there?

The evening wound up with some earnest discussions with some Young Democrats, and they were mostly concerned about development issues, especially Urban Transit and so forth. I was trying to tout my vision of focusing development of mass-transit -- preferably light rail or some variation -- along the MD-28/MD-198 corridor from perhaps Laurel through to Rockville, with connections to MARC commuter rail, and potentially crossing the Potomac in the vicinity of Seneca, MD/Sterling, VA and connecting through to the new Metrorail planned to run through Tyson's Corner towards Reston. A plan for a sort of "outer beltway of commuter rail" is long overdue and really needs to happen, as everyone knows who bothers to think about it.

One young man was complaining a bit about the isolation and lack of community -- not to mention things to do -- in the Land of Sprawl And McMansions On Two Acre Lots. He had a great point. How can you develop community when you have to walk five minutes to talk to your neighbor and barely have a chance to even meet them, and everyone else in the "neighborhood" -- is it a neighborhood if nobody ever meets anyone else because the yards are so large and people are so busy? -- mostly doesn't know their other neighbors either. Quite the puzzle. Then again, it might be that the opportunities to be gregarious which many young folks crave and need, are the exact things that many parents -- especially middle-aged ones at the peak of their careers -- would rather not have to deal with? Again, quite the set of puzzles and there are a variety of viewpoints from which to examine it, each of which viewpoints is not without merit.

Well, enough from me for tonight. I certainly got a lot to think about, not just from the questions asked, but from the answers given, and subsequent commentaries thereon.

Thank goodness I have a few days to recover, the last few nights have been somewhat grueling for me.

Next: if I can remind myself, a rather obscure dissertation in which I shall try to explain that when I say I am not gregarious, it doesn't mean that I dislike people or don't care about them or anything of the sort. The brief summary, mostly to remind myself, is that my own style is more like that of a cat than of a pack of dogs. Cats like to reconnoiter, get the lay of the land, study their objectives, and get into position, and be damned quiet as they do it. Dogs like to rush in making a lot of noise and they don't care about much other than getting into position around their quarry and bringing it down. Both styles work. And both cats and dogs generally like people, but dogs are never so happy as when they are all curled up in a big old dogpile at the feet of their master. Cats are never so happy as when they're all curled up on something nice and warm that doesn't jump up to answer the phone every time it rings. Dogs are extremely gregarious. Cats are social, but not in a gregarious way. You don't generally see packs of cats chasing things around, but good luck maintaining a civilization if you don't have cats policing the mice out of the granary. Yet dogs seem to get more respect from more people because they historically helped people put large helpings of fresh meat on the table. And besides, dogs fall all over themselves to be friendly to their adopted pack of humans or anything that much looks like them, while cats may prefer that you wouldn't interrupt their stalk; they have mice to clean out of the grain, dontcha know. Yet once they're done with their day's work, they just want to be close and purr...

Eh, I'm losing it. Must sleep.