Once More into the Breach

Last night the Democratic Town Committee held its special meeting to pick the slate for the November 8 municipal election. The Republicans had their primary vote on Tuesday so we had some sense of who the competition was going to be.As Vice Chair, I spent the last month juggling preparations for the meeting, the subsequent campaign, and overseeing the DTC’s website revamp while also answering numerous questions from tyros. There was a lot of recruiting to be done, especially in my own district where it the Dems had a fairly stable slate of candidates going back a decade or so. In 2009, as you may recall, the incumbents were swept out of office, victims of the nationwide tide of fear and frustration that trumped reason.This time around, we were looking for new faces, fresh voices. We hit PTA-active parents hard and we knocked on neighbors’ doors and made countless phone calls. All this work netted us a mix of new and old.A few weeks back, I mentioned my weekly Patch column had been suspended until after the election so they would not appear partisan. That freed me to consider running again and at first I refused to consider it, given my school commitments. One day, though, Deb surprised me and said she thought I should go for it. “You’re good at it, and you want to do it,” she said. That got me to thinking.Last night it was made official: I will once more be a Democratic candidate for the Representative Town Meeting in district 8. Alongside me will be Allen Marks and Mitch Fuchs, both RTM vets, along with Bill Barrett and newcomer Brian Sikorski. Making time for walking the neighborhood will be tricky but doable and once the heat abates, work can begin in earnest. Our competition is made up of three incumbents and two newcomers and the district is fairly divided between Ds and Rs so it will come down, as usual, to the independents to determine who will represent the area.Wish me luck.