County commissioner candidates need a plan
Recently, the wife and I came to the realization that you can’t fill a hole in the ocean by constantly dumping money into it. Our “PT Cruiser” was dying and our efforts to keep it on life support were futile, not to mention expensive. No sooner than we’d cure one of the car’s ailments, another one would pop up.
I put a lot of miles on a car. It’s exactly 50 miles to go from my garage to my place of employment. That’s a hundred miles a day just to get to and from work. If you live in Fayette County and know you’re worth more than minimum wage, that’s what you have to do.
After using all of the best arguments I could think of, the Mrs. (who keeps the books) broke weak, agreed, and we started our pilgrimage to dealerships to lock ourselves into years of debt to pay for something we needed.
If I had unlimited money, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Ah, but I don’t, so it is.
See the connections? Come on, I’m not so cryptic that you can’t see the point I’m trying to make. However, if you need me to spell it out for you: Come November, we’ll be picking county commissioners to steer our county through the next four years. We need someone to solve our prison problem and all the rest that plague us in the county.
If you’ve ever read any of the “stuff” I write, you know I’ve been pretty critical of those leading our county currently and throughout the recent past. I inferred that these incumbents have turned Fayette County into a “ship of fools.”
I’m the guy that called for term limits. I’m the guy that complained about all of the incumbents and tried to encourage you all to send them packing and replace them with “new blood.” Since new people couldn’t possibly do worse, maybe they’d do better.
For the most part, the two-party system has failed us. Seventy-five percent of what they offer is what we’ve already had. The new guy in the mix is someone who has been an “also ran” for some time now. His party’s “big-wigs” endorsed his opponents in the primary.
I think Mr. Show (who heads the Republican Party) and Mr. Davis (who leads the Democratic Party) are responsible for all this. Obviously, they confuse electing county commissioners with electing a pope. People that might think they have something to offer Fayette County are required to pass some “unwritten iitmus test” that they’re perfect.
When they find that person, I’ll vote for them. Until then, maybe they should burn their dictionaries.
You know I’m not one of the preachers that plague these pages, but aside from God himself, I can’t think of anyone who is perfect. If you think you can, you’re “full of it.”
I contend that since the two parties have relatively abandoned us (we have been rudderless for some time now), we have every right (and the responsibility) to abandon them.
Currently we have two Independent candidates vying for two of the three seats up for election. They both were Democrats, but there seems to have been some falling out between them and the party. Considering that party’s track record, that might be a good thing.
As best I can determine, only one of the announced candidates has come up with a plan for the next four years. That Independent candidate is Sean Cavanagh. I’ve had a few minutes to talk to him about his plan and vision for the county. To someone as cynical as me, his plan might be optimistic, but then he talks like an optimistic kind of guy.
In all honesty, I don’t know if his plan will work, but I do know that his plan has a better chance of succeeding than “no plan at all” does. To date, that’s all the other candidates have offered us. They want us to vote for them because. I wonder: “because of what?”
It kind of rubs me the wrong way that Mr. Cavanagh is a past commissioner. You know how I feel about term limits, but he’s the only one that offers anything more than: name recognition, trite campaigning and lame slogans. Is he trying to elevate this election from a mere “beauty pageant” into an “idea pageant?” That would be unique for Fayette County.
None the less, I won’t personally support him, because of my position on term limits. You; on the other hand, aren’t me.
Jack Cole, a pilot and local businessman, is the other Independent candidate. Since he’s a pilot, he obviously can tell which way the wind blows. He piloted both a plane and a business and neither crashed and burned, unlike what our county seems to be doing. I’d feel confident with a pilot at the controls, “but Jack, I need to know where we’re going, first.”
You need two commissioners to get anything done. Maybe I just named them. Of course, I could be wrong. I told you long ago that unlike the Mazzas, (who I respect for doing it) I won’t be writing any letters of apology for leading you astray.
If a candidate wants my vote, they need a plan that they can accomplish and agree that they’ll write us all a “letter of apology,” in this newspaper, if they let us down. They want us to believe in them, let’s see how much they believe in themselves.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you play: “politics.” The way we’ve been playing it is pretty “goofy.”
John Lucas is a resident of Vanderbilt.