The primary portion of the elections for 2018 are done, and for the most part, I came out the other side chagrined and disappointed at the results.
Some of the candidates I personally supported and voted for lost. That is always disappointing to me, but we live in a free society in which my choices and your choices don't always have to agree.
Take, for example, the current situation with our President. There are a lot of disgruntled folk out there that have done everything in their power to undermine the duly and legally elected Commander-in-Chief just because they didn't get "their" way.
The bottom line? I'm not like that. The person that gets elected under what ever process there is to get elected is the person that gets the job. Good, bad or indifferent, that's the way it works. You deal with it and move on.
The most disappointing part is the low voter turnout. Statewide, they say about 18% of the eligible voters actually voted. That's ridiculous. Especially when officals have made it so simple to cast your ballot with the emergence of "voting centers" and early voting opportunities.
The way I see it, 82% of you have no skin in the game. I don't want to hear your bitching and whining and moaning about this politician or that politician--or complaining about millage rates or other high taxes-- when you were too lazy to even bother to vote. You forfeited your right to even have an opinion, much less express one.
There is a lot of dirt about several candidates and candidate-elects that the public doesn't know. I sat on information that would have resulted in a different outcome of one local election because the person that finished second in the race implored me not to release the information on his opponent and the situation. Said they didn't want to win the election that way.
That takes class and integrity. Something that I'm not sure the guy who won the race possesses.
In another instance, I was given information Monday night in another area county race that would have buried one of the hopefuls. I didn't use the information for two reasons. I couldn't contact the person in question to give him a chance to respond to the charges and he -- as the final vote indicates --had less than a snowball's chance in hell of winning in the first place.
And those two examples were just the tip of the iceberg. My job is not to influence elections. It's to report on them.
Politics have always been nasty. In a senatorial primary in the 1950's in a rural district in Florida, candidate George Smathers was attributed with the following quote about his opponent, Claude Pepper.
''Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.''
Someone could use the same rhetoric about their opponent today in an Arkansas election and in some races the voters would be swayed by the notion of a "damn extrovert a-carrying on with his sister-in-law who approves of his sister being one of them same sex people and was celibating all over the place before he married Junie May Johnson."
Smather said he never said what was attributed yo him, but he did ding Pepper with the nickname "Red" which aligned him in the minds of the rural voters with McCarthyism that was dominating headlines at the time.
There is a long time between now and November. Sadly, some of the races were settled last night and the primary winners face no opposition in the November General Election. But it's a long time to November. So you have time to research, study and question all of the candidates and make informed decisions.
In my case, I will be doing something I rarely do in November and reaching across party lines to vote for the lesser of two evils. I don't like picking my candidates that way, but sometimes you are left with no choice.
But one thing is for certain. I will vote. It's my right and my responsibility.And it's yours too.
Use it or lose it. That choice is yours.