Another year, I guess

Let me assure you that I am as lukewarm and halfhearted as possible when I say: I won't be running for Congress this year.

I was planning, of course, to run for the open seat in FL 11; our current Congressman, Jim Davis, is running for governor. I believe Mr. Davis to be an instructive case.
Many (myself included) argued that the Congressman was too chicken***t to run for governor; he has flirted with the idea at least twice before and both times stayed in Congress when it appeared he would face a difficult race for the nomination.
Some would argue that Mr. Davis would have made a much better nominee than the actual '02 nominee, who's name I have forgotten because he was such a lackluster and nebbish individual. I am one of those people. Mr. Davis is a good candidate and a good man, and should do well in the race if he is the eventual nominee.

However, as is always the case in elective politics, outside factors will have a more significant say in the ultimate outcome than anything the candidates themselves might do.

That said, by waiting so many years to finally run, Mr. Davis seems to have achieved what he was looking for in the first place--a fairly easy path to the nomination. FL 11 is and has been a solid Democratic seat, and Davis has faced few difficult races in his 8 years in office. The field contesting his open seat this year presently includes five Democrats and one Republican; the Republican (an accountant) has no chance of winning but will definitely succeed in raising his name ID and respect in local GOP circles as the party's sacrificial lamb. Among the Democrats running are a county commissioner, a state representative, two local lawyers, and another guy who mainly seems to be running to raise the issue of rapprochement with Cuba. The county commissioner, Kathy Castor, is the daughter of the 2004 Dem U.S. Senate nominee and is presumably the frontrunner in this race primarily on the basis of name ID.

Though it is an open race, I would not, as Mr. Davis does, have the advantage of being a clear frontrunner for this seat. Why not? I'm not known. That's probably the main disadvantage to running now. But at the same time, this isn't necessarily a race I needed to win. What is the point, after all, of running for office if you are not going to fight for it? If you just waltz in with no concern, what have you done? Who among your constituents have you convinced of your positions? Why did people vote for you? Because they knew your name? That is a soulless sort of political life, and I for one would never want to run a race without opponents, serious opponents who could raise serious ideas and with whom I could have serious debates. After all, in my mind the goal of elective politics is not to defeat an opponent but to have a serious discussion of issues, to bring the voters in to discuss those issues, and then may the best man win. This is, of course, why I realistically have no place in modern American elective politics.

Some commenters on the poll brought up some good points.
1. Money. Do I have seed money? Yes. I have a home equity loan I'd like to pay off soon (with money I plan to make in Iraq), but I could easily write myself a check on that loan to provide seed money for a campaign. Raising money would be a different matter, and I find cold calling prospects as unpleasant a prospect as my candidate did in 2000; of course, we also lost that race. But I accept that raising money will be an unpleasant aspect of any race I run and I will not let money alone keep me from running in a race where I feel I have something to add to the debate.

2. Are there local volunteers for campaign treasurer, campaign workers, etc? One of the difficulties an independent candidate faces is that, come general election time, there is no pre-existing party support structure to handle knocking on doors, GOTV efforts, and the like. That said, the five Democrats running in the primary this year will have to fend for themselves in the primary and only get that support structure after becoming the nominee. Do I have those volunteers in place? No. Am I reasonably confident I could get them? Yes. But reasonable confidence is not everything, and the fact I do not, off the top of my head, know somebody I would ask to be my campaign treasurer (though I could of course do that myself) is at the least a sign that my ties to this community are weak.

3. Would it be better to run for a lower-level office? No. Not in this circumstance; after all, there are no open seats in any district I live in for city council or county commission, and I am much better versed in national issues than I am in local ones. This would also be a problem in a Congressional race, but a much less significant one, since none of the candidates can claim to be "local" in all parts of the district, and all will have to learn together about the issues that matter in some areas.

4. The interesting question of whether someone ought to keep their interests as interests and not as their sole means of support got me to thinking, about much more than just this race. In the end, though, I concluded that politics is at least one thing that is silly to keep as an interest without trying to engage. I can understand the problem of finding that, once a thing becomes your sole means of support, no matter how much you enjoy it you will lose something of the enjoyment you drew from it when you have to do it to pay the bills. We should all hope to find a job that we do for something more than just the money, but we should also keep in mind that those things we are most passionate about might best be kept as passions, and not as work. I don't know anyone who would say work and passion are the same, or even should be the same. But again, as I said politics doesn't seem like the type of thing I can do on the side. A lot of people can, and do, and much of the current electoral system in this country is based on the volunteers who live for this but would never run for office themselves. That's not who I am.
After I managed the campaign in 2000 I am sure several people reading this recall me saying I was no longer interested in running for office. And at the time, I wasn't. What's more, I have if anything become even more jaded about politics and campaigns since then, and that experience jaded me pretty well green. Yet here I am, seriously contemplating giving it a shot anyway. Is it a psychosis? Possibly. But in any event it doesn't look like I'll be staying on the sidelines forever.

That said, I will be staying on the sidelines this year. As I was thinking it over, I had a few reasons for deciding against.

One was money, which is a distasteful thing in most cases and which I have little interest in or talent for raising. A good fundraiser can do amazing things--witness the amount of money Howard Dean raised in 2003 almost exclusively on the internet. I was, to be honest, planning on using the Howard Dean model anyway--aside from the ranting populism, which I don't entirely buy. But, I'm not sure I'm ready yet for that kind of involvement in the fundraising game. Maybe another few years, after I meet some people or move someplace where I find the idea a little easier to swallow.

Another was local connections, which by and large I lack. I was lucky that St. Pete Clay is in my district, so I've been over in that area and know some of the folks in St. Pete and Midtown who I'd have to be asking for votes. But Bradenton I've been to all of twice, and even here in Tampa I simply don't have a network of local friends. Of course I'm not the sort of person who creates that network easily (a "natural politician," as they say), so wherever I go I'm going to face that problem. Knowing that, I've looked on FL 11 as an easy district for a person like me, since the district is almost entirely in one community; most Congressional districts (which, remember, have about 800,000 people in them) sprawl over huge territories that require a lot of travel, require knowing the bigfeet in a lot of different communities, and require knowledge of often disparate areas and their concerns. FL 11 is basically Tampa, Ruskin, south St. Pete and Gulfport, and parts of downtown Bradenton.

The third problem I thought of is one that would dog me no matter where I ran or for what office as long as I continue to be a thin, neat, single white man. Thank goodness this is a Democratic-leaning district, but I nonetheless assume that at some point somebody would "leak" to the press that I am gay. This is what torpedoed Mark Foley's Senate campaign in 2002 (though he was smarter than Mel Martinez and would be a much better Senator), and these whispers have followed most single men in politics througout their careers, including the extremely conservative Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for whom I volunteered a bit in 1998 (and who I'm pretty sure isn't gay). I'm secure enough in my sexuality that this isn't reason enough to stop me from running--especially not in this district--but at the same time it's just a bother. For whatever reason modern America doesn't like single people to be older than about 27. After that, you must either be heartbreakingly divorced, widowed, or homosexual. I don't know if it was always this way, but it is irritating (I've been told, also, that I should expect Iraqi men to fix me up with their sisters once I let slip that I'm not married, since the assumption is that if you aren't married you must be miserable about it) and I'm not really prepared to argue that, frankly, at this point in my life I'd actually feel bad about dragging other people through the constant changes in direction I make. Perhaps there's someone out there who also wants to change careers and living locations every couple of years and doesn't know what she wants to be she grows up, and who isn't ten. But I haven't met her.

I think most of these problems can be overcome, which leaves the main reason for staying out of the race this year: logistics. Timing is a big factor--the news value of coming home from Iraq and jumping into a campaign is inestimable, but I'd be coming home AFTER qualifying closes, and with only five months to campaign. That's pretty harsh. If we were to back up the entire timeline of my life about three months then things would be a lot better. As it is, all the previously stated difficulties simply become that much more difficult when time is so compressed. Additionally, there is the matter of my still technically being employed by the U.S. Air Force at least through the summer. Though I'd be out by the time of the election (and yes, it is legal to run while on active duty, I looked it up, but it doesn't come up much), the problems inherent in both having to work for the government by day and then not being allowed to say anything bad about the government seem almost insurmountable. I can't participate in political speech in uniform or in any official capacity as a member of the military. Since I would certainly make note of my service at the outset of the campaign and continuously thereafter, it becomes legally tricky to say I'm not representing the military when I speak, since I'd be speaking not just as a veteran but as a current member of the military. I'm just not sure I want to go down that road, since I don't know where it leads and it could, in any event, get ugly.

So, I'm not going to run for Congress this year. Another year, I guess.