Dear George,

I was very heartened to see Josh Chernila's post, with which I am in agreement. Nevertheless, I thought that I'd go ahead and toss my two cents into the fray.

I must admit that I was shocked (and even scandalized) to read Jeff Fracher's lambasting of Alex Searl's campaign, all the more so since the campaign was a joint campaign and basic rules of fairness would seem to rule against selecting out one member of a joint campaign for attack while failing to mention the other one. This is not meant to encourage Mr. Fracher's ire to be directed at Blake Caravati, rather it is meant to point out how misguided it is to attack Ms. Searls for running an "abysmal" campaign when she was only half of the team.

I would certainly understand an expression of some doubt as to the wisdom of running a joint campaign (I have some rather serious doubts about that myself), but to ignore the basic structure of the campaign he attacks strikes me as unfair, at the very least.

Indeed, given Mr. Caravati's experience, name-recognition, and current office, Ms. Searls' positions on the issues were almost guaranteed to take second place to his: one should not be surprised to find many more quotations from Mr. Caravati in the media, nor should one be surprised to find Ms. Searls' positions eclipsed by his. Once again, this is not a criticism of Mr. Caravati as much as it is an observation on the pitfalls of a joint campaign in which one member is quite well established and the other is less so.

And of course all of this ignores the party's failure to get voters to the polls: given the incredibly low voter turnout in Democratic precincts, I think that the party as a whole bears a good deal of the blame for the election of a Republican to the city council. If the Democrats had organized as well as the Republicans, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

But we are, and here I think that the call to unity sounded by Josh Chernila should fall on attentive ears: either we Democrats can maintain the divisive sort of backbiting that helped put a Republican on the city council, or we can decide that we'd rather stand solidly behind our Democratic candidates, even if they might not necessarily be the Democratic candidates we as individuals might prefer. Although I fully supported Ms. Searls' candidacy, I would like to think that I would have offered the same level of support to another candidate chosen through the convention.

To be honest, I cannot say for sure how Alex Searls would have faired if the party had opted for individual campaigns in which each candidate spoke out in his or her individual voice and if the party had managed to get our voters to the polls. But I'd be pretty willing to bet that we wouldn't be watching as a Republican takes a seat on the city council...

Sincerely,

Keith Alan Sprouse (electronic mail, May 10, 2002)