WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A CITY COUNCIL CANDIDATE?

(The first in a series)
For the past few days, I’ve been on vacation and traveling between Auburn, Massachusetts and East Lyme, Connecticut where my daughters Susan and Margaret live.  It’s been great seeing two of our kids and their families.  We also got to talk to a lot of people in both places and since Big Dog, the political junkie, was involved in the conversation, the conversations soon got around to politics.

In almost every conversation two main points always came up: 1) We don’t like almost everything our President and Congress are doing to us right now and 2) Come November we’ve got to un-elect our incumbent representative.    Most people were quite angry.  Almost everyone was afraid of what was going on in our country for one reason or another.

Invariably, the conversation got around to just what kind of a person one would vote for to replace the current representative.   There the conversation slowed down and people seemed to be at a loss for words.  When asked why the answers were coming so slowly, (if at all), most answered that they had never had to think about that before because they simply voted in reaction to the candidates put before them in the election.  It struck me that maybe just maybe we had struck on a major reason why we seem to be in the trouble we are in.

How can we possibly judge a person’s qualifications?  How can we ask the right questions at the Candidates’ Forum if we don’t have some concept of what the ideal candidate might be?  So, I decided to try and come up with what characteristics I think the ideal candidate should have in the hope that you the readers will critique my analysis and add some ideas of your own.  I selected the candidate for the Gulfport City Council as our subject since our City Council is a microcosm of larger legislative bodies and  is probably most familiar to us.  We can apply almost the same criteria to our County Commission, State Legislature, Congress and Senate in that all office holders are elected representatives of you and me.

After a lot of thought, (being on vacation is a great time to think), and conversation with family and friends, I have come up with The Seven Essentials for Public Service.  Of course almost no one candidate will have all seven essential characteristics but the degree to which they do might predict their potential for success from the voter’s standpoint.  OK, here they are:

1. Availability-the willingness to serve and to focus on the job over the long term.
2. Character-a history of successful living that is demonstrated by measurable facts.
3. Motivation-dedication to a service to others with no overriding personal agenda.
4. Capacity-having necessary knowledge to do the job by education and/or experience.
5. Communication- the willingness and ability to clearly express ideas and the willingness to listen.
6. Flexibility-the courage to change positions when confronted by new information.
7. Creativity-the ability and desire to deal in ideas and to think outside the box.

You may have noticed that “Leadership” is not listed as a desirable characteristic of a candidate.  That’s because the degree to which the candidate possesses all these characteristics will determine whether or not they have the capacity to lead.  It might be interesting during the next election process to create your own list of desirable characteristics and then rank each candidate on a scale of 1-10.  It might also be interesting to watch all the incumbents and rate them on a scale of 1-10 every few months.  It wouldn’t hurt if you let them know how they scored.

Also notice that there is no recognition of emotion based criteria in the list.  All too often our political choices are based almost entirely on emotion.  In order to be responsible voters, we need to guard against emotionalism and base our judgments on provable information.  Glib speeches, physical attractiveness, age, gender, race, religion, rumors, gossip, etc. all need to be removed from the process if we are to deserve the right to judge a candidate.  If we can objectively develop our personal list of desirable candidate criteria and the score each candidate, we can lessen or eliminate emotion from our choices.

While this piece is mainly about the criteria for a good candidate for public office, it would be unfair not to mention the responsibilities of the voter.  The prior paragraph is a case in point.  A summary of voter responsibilities can be found in one word, “knowledge.”  The more you know about history and the workings of government, the better you can uphold your responsibilities as a voter.  That is why we recommend attendance at City Council Meetings and your Council reps. “meet the voter sessions.”   Anything you need to know about the current activities of your local government, the City Charter, the City Budget and our municipal rules and regulations are readily available on the City of Gulfport website at www.mygulfport.us.  Enhancing voter knowledge about local government is also the driving force behind  this blog.

In the coming weeks each of the Seven Essentials for Public Service will be explored in depth,  We look forward to your comments and, where appropriate, will discuss them in future articles on the subject.  Who knows, we might even do some rating of our current Council Members.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 4:04 pm and is filed under 06-10. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.