One Year Ago Today

It's hard to believe a whole year has gone by. One year ago tonight, I was sitting in the bar at Shebeen with my campaign manager and some other supporters, awaiting the results of the May 2006 City Council election. I was tired -- I had been running from polling station to polling station all day long, greeting voters and making one last push in a campaign that we had kicked off 5 months prior. Sitting there in the bar, I honestly had no idea if I was going to win election or not. (Three candidates -- myself, Julian Taliaferro and Rob Schilling -- were vying for two seats on Council.) The pundits and the political insiders had been saying for weeks/months that I was the underdog in the race. Accordingly, I had steeled myself for bad news.

The polls closed at 7pm and it wasn't 10 minutes before the results started trickling in by cell phone. The first results, if I remember correctly, were from Clark precinct. I came in first, Julian second. Sweet! But that was my home precinct, and a fairly solid Democratic one, so I didn't let myself get too excited. Over the next 20-30 minutes, though, more and more good news came our way. When I heard that I had won Walker precinct (one of the more conservative precincts in the City), I knew the election was over. Rob Schilling had run a good race, but it was a Democratic year (recall the Democratic sweep of Congress that fall) and in the end, Julian and I were victorious. We had one hell of a GOTV (Get Out The Vote) operation and boy did they Get Out The Votes!

I'm not much of a navel-gazer and I'm constitutionally disinclined to toot my own horn, but I have been reflecting a good bit about what I've/we've been able to accomplish on City Council over the past year and on balance, I'm fairly pleased with the results. One of the things that I like about this City Council is that we all tend to focus a lot more of our time and energy on trying to make good decisions than on holding press conferences to tout our good decisions. As a consequence, there are a lot of positive things that this Council has done that haven't gotten a whole lot of public attention. Lord knows we don't get everything right, but I do believe we have some accomplishments to be proud of, and in the next couple of days I'm going to share what I believe to be some of the most significant of them. Having said all of that, there's a whole lot of work yet to be done, and I look forward to sharing my thoughts on that subject too.

Stay tuned...