![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
$candidate Wants Your Vote
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 12:36 amThe first election in which I participated, when I was just 18, featured twenty candidates for six city council seats. I spent about a day going through the excellent interviews by the Boulder Weekly, comparing their endorsements with the Daily Camera's, and generally considering what sort of city government my home town should have.
Boulder's a unique place. It's got an independent daily paper (with focus weighted to the University), a daily paper owned by a national chain, and (at the time) two independent weekly papers. I now live in Lakewood, the fourth largest city in the state, but its media situation is not nearly as meaty. There's a weekly paper with Lakewood in its name, but I think most of the stories are shared by papers in other suburbs. As part of the metro area, we can look to the major Denver papers (Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, published by a single company). Unfortunately, the endorsements editorial for Lakewood contained at most two sentences for any city council ward seat and their mayoral endorsement rested on a comparison to a football team. So much for hard-hitting journalism.
Fortunately, modern technology being what it is, I can watch the LWV mayoral forum on my computer at midnight while making a sandwich naked. Three-time candidate Linda Delay is working without notes and has something of a note-quite-with-the-program feel. Bob Murphy clearly has experience in city government, he's probably averaging at least two or three buzzwords or technical government terms per sentence. Rita Bertolli also has the vocab down, but with a fight-for-the-little-guy attitude compared to Murphy's "I'll keep up the good job I've been doing."
Bertolli had some entertaining turns of phrase. "Shove down our necks." "Cervic-minded." "If there was a solution to transit, Los Angeles would have found it long ago."
But the winner is is Murphy's answer to the final question: "[My vision for Lakewood is] a place where we can live, work, play, recreate, shop and dine all without leaving our cars in many cases." I think recreation and dining without leaving a car is the transit solution Los Angeles found.
Boulder's a unique place. It's got an independent daily paper (with focus weighted to the University), a daily paper owned by a national chain, and (at the time) two independent weekly papers. I now live in Lakewood, the fourth largest city in the state, but its media situation is not nearly as meaty. There's a weekly paper with Lakewood in its name, but I think most of the stories are shared by papers in other suburbs. As part of the metro area, we can look to the major Denver papers (Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, published by a single company). Unfortunately, the endorsements editorial for Lakewood contained at most two sentences for any city council ward seat and their mayoral endorsement rested on a comparison to a football team. So much for hard-hitting journalism.
Fortunately, modern technology being what it is, I can watch the LWV mayoral forum on my computer at midnight while making a sandwich naked. Three-time candidate Linda Delay is working without notes and has something of a note-quite-with-the-program feel. Bob Murphy clearly has experience in city government, he's probably averaging at least two or three buzzwords or technical government terms per sentence. Rita Bertolli also has the vocab down, but with a fight-for-the-little-guy attitude compared to Murphy's "I'll keep up the good job I've been doing."
Bertolli had some entertaining turns of phrase. "Shove down our necks." "Cervic-minded." "If there was a solution to transit, Los Angeles would have found it long ago."
But the winner is is Murphy's answer to the final question: "[My vision for Lakewood is] a place where we can live, work, play, recreate, shop and dine all without leaving our cars in many cases." I think recreation and dining without leaving a car is the transit solution Los Angeles found.
