In eight weeks, on Tuesday November 3, 1998, the polls will be open
waiting for you and me to vote. If we are apathetic, then half or fewer of
us will cast a ballot. There are attractive candidates. They want us to
choose from among them North Carolina's next junior U.S. Senator, Western
North Carolina's U.S. Representative and a passel of state legislators,
judges, sheriffs and others. On the third of November many of us will make
time to go carp fishing or play golf or shop for bargains and yet not
bother to elect office holders.

It is not too late to elect the best people available on the first Tuesday
in November. First, let's make up our mind: I SHALL vote. For if I don't
vote, then I concede power to those who do vote. Why should you not
influence whether your neighborhood will be annexed? Will you leave
entirely to others the makeup of the potential "impeachment Congress" to
assemble in Washington next January?

First, we can examine our personal attitude towards fellow citizens who run
for public office. Do we resent them? I hope not. If we think about it, we
must be grateful to anyone willing to step forward as a candidate.  All of
us ought to thank our neighbors for being candidates whenever we are given
the chance. And that is true whether we intend to vote for particular
candidates or not. If they win, their pay will be less than they deserve.
Their hours will be long. Even winners will not please everybody. And
voters who are not pleased will be quick to criticize.

Having first shown our gratitude, we must next be fair to all candidates.
We will never know enough about any of them (unless one is our spouse). We
must, therefore, vote on the basis on inadequate knowledge. Yet we still
have eight weeks before the election. And we can learn much in that time.
We have to overcome two personal temptations: towards bias and towards
oversimplification. We might be tempted to ask: is John a Democrat or a
Republican?  Baptist or Bahai? Married or divorced? Jeffersonian or
Hamiltonian? And once we know the answer to any one question like that we
might feel justified in considering any additional questioning unnecessary.
But from one slice of a person's biography we cannot fairly determine her
fitness for public office. Nor is it enough to say "I like Ike" or "I can't
stand Bill."

If we are honest with ourselves, we know that we have to purge our
unreasonable biases before we vote. When I was a boy, my father told  me:

"There is one crucial difference between a person we call friend and a person we call enemy. We are willing to overlook the faults of the one, but not the other." 

Wait a minute!  Whoa! Surely we are obliged to do more digging and find out
why Jack thinks as he does. What would Buncombe County be like if Jack's
ideas became law?  Let's imagine it. We are all tempted to oversimplify.
And over-simplification is unfair. Let us therefore make time to think
through the leading ideas which  candidates campaign on and not elect them
through snap judgments.

How much do we need to know about a candidate's life? Is his health,
physical or mental, so bad that he cannot discharge his office if elected?
What has he made of his life so far? Has she been arrested, served time in
jail? Stood up for the poor and the oppressed? Deserted spouse and
children? If a candidate has held elective office before, what did he
promise then? And how much did he deliver?

If she wins a North Carolina legislative race, she will add to her party's
numerical strength in the two Legislative Houses in Raleigh. Once there
will she speak and work for justice, fairness and straight dealing? Or will
the person we elect miss opportunities, just make a lot of legislative
noise, alienate members of both parties and get nothing done? Can he play
his assigned part honorably and effectively in his own party caucus? Can
she reach and accept unavoidable compromises with the other party? Will she
actively listen to the people of Asheville, Brevard, Hendersonville and Old
Fort?

We have eight weeks to clarify what we expect of office holders. By what
standards do we choose to promote them from candidates to winners? Once in
office what will the candidate do better for all the people than will his
opponent? Character also matters. Low moral stature ought to disqualify
from holding office. Character may not be the end. But it is the beginning.
Good character and decent, polite, mature behavior are not SUFFICIENT
conditions for a candidate to merit our vote. But they ought to be
NECESSARY conditions. Granted that a lovable rogue might well be a master
of technical balance-of-power politics. But aren't there enough lovable
non-rogues out there to choose from?  If not, then two years hence, let's
encourage better people to become candidates.

We can do a lot with our eight remaining weeks.  If we have not registered
to vote, we still can. We also have time to pick out a few good books to
read or re-read: such as 

--Garry Wills's UNDER GOD: RELIGION AND AMERICAN POLITICS
or 
--William Kilpatrick's WHY JOHNNY CAN'T TELL RIGHT FROM WRONG.

Who will be listed as a candidate on the ballot is now beyond our ability to
determine. But it is not too late to look at ourselves, blow away the
cobwebs, do a little thinking and prepare ourselves to vote without bias
and with fairness.

-OOO

for Asheville TRIBUNE