Labor Day is Over!

Jon DeHart for Town Council:http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=98411254462 Brownstein for School Board:http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=215376445297 MaryAnne Gucciardi for Chapel Hill Carrboro City School Board:http://www.facebook.com/pages/MaryAnne-Gucciardi-for-Chapel-Hill-Carrbor...  

Change the Council - into what? 

I got the Kevin Wolff poll call last night. The question was slightly different. I indicated that Mark Kleinschmidt was my choice fof the 4 mayoral candidates I would vote for if the election were held today. I was then asked if it would change my vote to know that Kevin Wolff is "the only moral candidate." I immediately answered that it would make me even less likely to vote for Kevin Wolff, if that were possible. That answer ended the telephone call for the pollster. Before he hung up, I was able to wish him a moral day. But the quick retreat meant I didn't get a chance to ask what morality was being pushed. As is, I can speculate, especially since by the posts here, I see that others were told Kevin was the change candidate and not the moral candidate. I wonder if my choice of Mark altered the question. No matter, if I were any of the other candiates, I would be insulted to discover that Kevin has decided they are all immoral.

So I received the phone call from Tom's group this AM about the election in CH.  Unfortunately, they didn't identify themselves in the automated message at the beginning, so I was wary of who was asking and lied on the 1st couple of answers (including Mayor).  The other questions (about direction of town, etc) were very good.  It'll be interesting to see their results.

Amazing to me they aren't more clever about these things; also amazing that they're so cynical and even shameless about the spin. Not one question was framed in what a true survey designer would have considered neutral.  The questions offered a multiple choice of 4 answers appropriate for a tea-bagging conservative and one throw-away if you insist on being a liberal - and it's often the easily-missed 4th out of 5.  For example, you are asked to say which of a list of 5 issues is most important to you: reducing taxes, controlling government waste, developing downtown, environmental issues, or (something like) making government more responsive to the people.  I'll be interested to see how this hits the media as if it were an "independent" survey.    (added Thurs. pm, FYI: I also had specified Kleinschmidt as my choice - and I also had them hang up on me when I responded to the "if KW were the only person who could really change things" question that I still wouldn't vote for him."  Are they taking names?)

"any member of the media who reports that his campaign has participated in a discussion regarding morality in the election." according to the DTH:http://www.dailytarheel.com/content/wolff-rejects-%E2%80%98moral%E2%80%9...Granted "moral" sounds quite a bit like "mayoral", but the sentence “Would you change your vote if you knew Kevin Wolff was the only mayoral candidate?” doesn't make any sense!  

"any member of the media who reports that his campaign has participated in a discussion regarding morality in the election." according to the DTH:http://www.dailytarheel.com/content/wolff-rejects-%E2%80%98moral%E2%80%9...Granted "moral" sounds quite a bit like "mayoral", but the sentence “Would you change your vote if you knew Kevin Wolff was the only mayoral candidate?” doesn't make any sense!  

Fred,I'm not sure whether that question was from the Sierra Club or one of the ones collected from the audience.  My recollection is that it was toward the end and thus might have been from the audience.  Probably as relevant to the mission/interests of the Sierra Club as the one about Dawson Hall which I know came from the audience.

I'm still hoping people will add events to the calendar. Only the candidates have a complete list. We've got a pretty good start though: http://www.orangepolitics.org/events

is an important statement.

Jim Merritt - HOV lanes on major transit corridors to increase carpooling and to make the bus a better option for commuters between Durham and Chapel Hill.

This would certainly be big funding competition with the proposed light rail line between Chapel Hill and Durham that the General Assembly recently approved a referemdum on but if so, there would not be enough room to both build a light rail line and add lanes for HOV.

You only need 530 votes to get elected to the Winston-Salem City Council? 

I should have known Larry Little was behind this, so it's all a big circle.Lots more details on Derwin Montgomery's primary win:

"Twice, Derwin Montgomery, a senior political-science student at Winston-Salem State University, had run for president of the Student Government Association, and twice he had lost.So early this summer, while the university was on break, he looked another direction to meet his goal of one day becoming a U.S. senator.Checking the Web site of the Forsyth County Board of Elections, Montgomery saw that voter turnout in the city's primaries is typically low. He estimated that he would need fewer than 500 votes to win the ward that encompasses Winston-Salem State. And he realized that if he could persuade the students to vote for him -- and get them to the polls -- he had a good shot at winning."We had this sleeping giant here," Montgomery said yesterday......Yesterday, Montgomery recounted how he turned his research into an election victory. He started a group on Facebook, the online social-networking site, titled "The Committee to Elect Derwin Montgomery." When classes started in the fall, he told other students about his plans to run. When the filing period opened, he went to the board of elections and filled out the paperwork.One of Montgomery's political-science professors was Larry Little, a former Winston-Salem alderman. Little read in the newspaper that Montgomery planned to run , so he sat down with his student and tried to find out what Montgomery was thinking."It was a good thing he didn't come to me before," Little said yesterday. "I would have told him not to run. I would have told him there was no way he'd win."After their talk, though, Little changed his mind. Montgomery had spoken articulately about his plans to improve public safety around the campus and to create jobs around the ward. Last year, Little watched the WSSU campus rally around Barack Obama's presidential campaign. He came to believe that with the right planning, Montgomery might have a shot.Montgomery, who had been running his campaign more or less alone, started delegating responsibility to fellow students. He had a "director of compliance" who helped WSSU students register to vote in Forsyth County. He had a "director of transportation" who organized vehicles to drive students to the board of elections so they could cast early ballots. He had two administrative assistants."

What the article does NOT tell you much about is that Larry Little was elected to that same seat in 1974 (Winston had its election in the even numbered years 'til 74). Larry was a Black Panther member in his late 20s then. In early January 1974, Larry called me -- he had heard that I was a college student just elected to the Chapel Hill Town Council, that he was running for W-S Council, and he wanted to talk strategy.  We met somewhere in the student Union at Carolina and talked campaign strategy and tactics for quite a while, and he went back to Winston and won.Not that I had much to do about it.