Vote and die

Remember all those "vote or die" campaigns targeting young voters, say from the mid-1990s through 2004 or 2008.

What happens when you vote and things still really suck?

What are you supposed to do when your choices are so rank, that you don't even want to go to the polls and cast a ballot to begin with?

This comes to mind after going around the city this past weekend (without my camera) and seeing campaign signs for Vincent Orange as DC Council Chair. Today's Post has a story about the campaign, "Vincent Orange will challenge Kwame Brown in race for D.C. Council chairmanship," and the very traditional terrible hacks (John Ray, H.R. Crawford, Kevin Chavous) who are supporting him. Ugh. Really bad. I can't think of many worse people in the city than John Ray (e.g., of the Florida Market City Council master development rights "land grab") or H.R. Crawford (real estate shenanigans) or Kevin Chavous and his charter schoolitis.

I wonder of course, if Kwame Brown is any better. I had the misfortune of attending his very first campaign event in something like 2003 or 2004 and so I've always had a hard time... I like his father, Marshall, but Marshall was one of Marion Barry's chief field directors, and that makes it even harder for me.

In the Mayoral election, we have choices between Mayor Fenty, who believes he knows everything, and isn't driven by vision, and Vince Gray. Gray is smart, but he, like all of the other candidates thus far, is for the most part one of the interchangeable cogs in the Growth Machine.

Abstract from "City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place" by Harvey Molotch:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine.

This is why I usually find it funny when people think that somehow their candidate is different. For the most part, all candidates support the consensus agenda of "growth."

Yes, it does make a difference between who gets elected, sometimes. I'd rather have a Martin O'Malley over a Robert Ehrlich. O'Malley supports transit and other ground-up economic development efforts (such as commercial district revitalization, heritage based tourism initiatives, etc.); Ehrlich does not.

But the choices the electorate faces in DC look increasingly bad, and except for the fact that you have other hacks running for the at-large City Council position (Clark Ray--his campaign plank is that Mayor Fenty needs more support on Council; Kelvin Robinson--he was chief of staff for awhile for Mayor Williams), targeting Phil Mendelson, who does in fact challenge the Growth Machine from time and time, and therefore has earned my support, I am looking at the upcoming primary election as a very distasteful experience where I don't want to go to the polls and vote at all.

Why is it that our choices are so bad to begin with?

Also see this blog entry from 2005, "Tom Sherwood, Duncan Spencer, Anwar Amal, and thinking about what I call the 'Uncivil War'"and this one from 2008, "Being "right" vs. being strategic politically."