drew 100 people to Midlothian’s civic center in February for an election forum featuring Republican primary candidates; the weeks of promotion by the Taxpayers Alliance for Good Government and a sizable mass-targeted mailing drew about a quarter of the GOP primary voting bloc.
Critics said it wasn’t a "legitimate" forum, but only because the Waxahachie Daily Light didn’t sponsor it.
The WDL and their sister paper, the Midlothian Mirror, had their chance in their own backyard and last Friday’s cramped candidate forum registered a tiny blip compared to several months previous – and this with annexation the hottest topic in western Ellis County.
Navarro College’s beautiful Midlothian campus – paid for by those revenue bonds Midlothian residents enacted several years ago – teamed up with the Mirror
and the local chamber of commerce to put on the event.
Three of the largest community-oriented organizations in town couldn’t come close to the event this paper was able to accomplish.
I point to a single campaign blockade for this discrepancy: consensus.
Consensus at all costs; compromising your stance for the good of "informing people."
Navarro was very quick to point out their forum was not to be a debate, only a tightly-regulated fish tank with very little room to make a distinction between opponents.
Some compromise is needed, but this consensus at all costs mentality doesn’t further a single ounce of truth.
You wonder why the voting population dwindles: It’s because politicians are politically corrected into compromising and conditioned to not speaking out.
Going along to get along can only last so long.
Everything else is just pure thought control.
Unfortunately, Navarro’s spin of the government students who helped facilitate Friday’s forum will learn a tough lesson when they’re out in the real world of politics – instead of learning it while in school.
That lesson: you stand out by standing up.
Your contribution to society is measured by what you do and what you believe in, not by what the establishment conditions you to say.
Ironically, the very leader I look up to the most in Midlothian – who was sitting in close proximity at the forum – taught me about this consensus trap.
Margaret Thatcher once wrote "consensus is the absence of leadership."
Midlothian doesn’t want future leaders. They want robots.
Candidate forums should be debates with the real issues being hammered out and voting records being scrutinized.
But then again, this was the first forum without Joey Dauben’s nameplate on the table.
My first taste of politics came in 2003, 2004 and 2005 when I ran for Midlothian school board – came close to winning the thing in ’03.
This paper packed the old civic center because we wanted to hash out the issues, not control people into fitting into cute little "community" boxes of group-think.
