Jeffco Line Updated

20 thoughts on “Jeffco Line Updated”

1. I intend to tilt on behalf of windmills, as well as at them….

   In all sincerity, we can afford to instill a bit more of the Don’s motivations into our political culture, as long as we leaven it with ample quantities of lucidity and pragmatism. But, as it now stands, we have so wrung nobility of purpose from the process that supposedly “sophisticated” commentators (i.e., “bloggers”) now confuse strategic expedience with moral imperative, and condemn candidates for not being disingenuous enough, or for not embracing the necessity of disingenuity. Frankly, modern amateur politicos have now become more Machiavillian than Machiavelli himself ever was!

   So, yes, my candidacy certainly is a quixotic adventure, in one sense of the term. But (with absolutely no intention of comparing myself to these great statesmen), so was Abraham Lincoln’s, and Barack Obama’s. More emphatically, The American Revolution was the quintessential quixotic adventure! Prosaic candidacies give us lackluster public officials. It is those few quixotic adventures that both are prosecuted by those with abundant and insightful practical knowledge, and improbably come to fruition, that turn out to be the vehicles of our highest of aspirations and most laudable of qualities.

   Log in to Reply

   1. You’re running in HD 28? As a Democrat? And you got 7-1 odds against an incumbent Republican? WAY TO GO. And Jim Kerr no less!

      I really think if you ran your words by someone, you could have a big impact down there. Seriously, I know it doesn’t sound great to dumb down your talking points. But, how many voters want to break out the old Webster’s to find out what this means?

      …as long as we leaven it with ample quantities of lucidity and pragmatism…

      Seriously, tone down the academics. You too will need to be pragmatic and randomly posting things on JeffCo Pols surely doesn’t make you look it.

      Log in to Reply

      1. Please contact me at steve.harvey.hd28@gmail.com. I’d be glad to continue the discussion with you.

         -steve.

         Log in to Reply

         1. Sure beats raising money, or persuading voters….

            Log in to Reply

   2. It’s not about “dumbing down.” Talking like this, and writing like this, doesn’t make you sound really smart and clever and qualified. It makes you sound really pompous. That’s all. If that’s what you’re going for, then you certainly nailed it.  

      Log in to Reply

      1. But just to be clear: I’m not trying to sound like anything, or to prove anything in posts like the one above, other than that I think we can do better, and that I have a particular vision of what it means to do better. I’ve written that way for decades, long before I ever contemplated running for office. I get that some people somehow find it offensive: I just don’t get why. I reread my above post several times, and I remain bewildered that it could engender such a reaction. All I know is that, though such criticisms existed before I announced my candidacy, they were far less common and far less virulent: Being a candidate causes the same person to be viewed through a different lens, one which distorts at least as much as it clarifies.

         I’ve tried to contribute to our collective existence in a variety of ways in my life, as a teacher, as a social theorist, as a writer, and now as a candidate. If people judge me ill-suited to that last role because of my writing style, or because of what they infer about my personality from my writing style, then such is life. I have no emotional need to be a candidate or an office-holder: It really is just an offering of services.

         I can tell you with absolute honesty that the only reason I am running for office is that I believe that I bring valuable assets to the enterprise of governance, and that I would be delighted to be able to put those assets to use in service to the public welfare.

         I don’t think that our current political custom of judging candidates on how good they are at being candidates is in our best interest: We should judge them, instead, on what they bring to the office for which they are candidates.

         I think the question we should be asking about candidates is: How well qualified are they for the job for which they are applying? Literary critiques and inferences of personality flaws are relevant only to the extent that they are relevant to that question. Apparently, those factors are very important to how good a candidate I am, but I am not running for office in order to be a good candidate. I am running for office in order to help implement reasonable policies motivated by good will.

         But I do hear and understand these criticisms. And I do understand that even if, as I and many others believe, I have some qualities that would make me a particularly good legislator, it isn’t enough if I can not manage to be a good candidate first. Since I can’t, or won’t, become (or pretend to be) a person other than the one I am, and am fully committed to advancing the values and policies that I think are very much in our collective interests, all I can do is to offer to step aside and vigorously support a better candidate not burdened with my flaws, if one will only step forward.

         In the meantime, I am offering to bring what qualities I do have to the state legislature, to work dilligently on behalf of the people of my district and of the state of Colorado. It is an offer that voters can accept or reject, as they see fit, and that commentators can respect or disparage, according to their wont. It remains nothing more or less than a simple offer, sincerely made.

         Log in to Reply
         1. Log in to Reply
            1. Log in to Reply

               1. Despite your purchase of domain space and use of the royal “we,” you’re just a person reproducing a set of unimaginative and dysfunctional assumptions. If a candidate steps forward but doesn’t focus on packaging and marketing himself, he has violated a perceived rule of the game. And, you’re right, he has probably diminished his chance of getting elected. But I’m far more concerned with challenging those unimaginative and dysfunctional assumptions than I am with getting elected. My candidacy is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. The end is the incremental advancement of human consciousness, which includes the social institutions and technologies that emanate from, and feed back into, that consciousness.

                  We live in a world comprised of nested and overlapping systems, including our human social and technological systems. Our individual choices, and how well we direct those choices toward accomplishing collective ends, affect how well we live, both individually and collectively. The more cognizant we are of this fact, and the more dilligent we are in applying our minds to the challenge implied by this fact, the richer our lives become.

                  Politics, as we currently understand and engage in it, is the reproduction of a small degree of success, and a large degree of failure, in our acknowledgement and implementation of the above truths. One of the systemic brakes on how well we manage to acknowledge and implement the above truths is the sophisticated system of political marketing that has, for inevitable evolutionary reasons, become predominant: It imposes a conservative and risk-averse imperative on political discourse by candidates and elected officials, and cultivates a “horse race” obsession on the part of most other commentators. It turns politics into something more like professional sports (with competitors, teams, fans, and spectators, and systems of keeping score), and less like a means for improving our collective existence.

                  If my ultimate goal in life were to be elected to office, I would submit to that imperative, because it works. And so we attract and elect, disproportionately, candidates whose primary goal is to get elected. In other words, there is a high degree of goal displacement in our political process, with the means (getting elected to office) becoming the ends.

                  As I wrote in my post above, if there were any other Democratic candidate interested in running in HD 28, I would defer to that candidate, because I am not the person best suited to getting elected and adding one more Democratic vote to our state legislature. I am running despite that fact because, ironically, I am a person very well suited to participating in the analysis and formation of social policy, observant of both the forest and the trees.

                  People, like you and I, who participate in public discourse, have a choice of what aspects of our current mindset we want to reinforce, and what aspects we want to challenge. My inclination is to challenge more and reinforce less, because we carry so much dysfunctional cognitive baggage, and have so much untapped potential to do dramatically better. I am challenging the defintion of a “good candidate,” raising questions about the conventional one of being the candidate most likely to get elected by following prescribed and tested techniques for doing so, and suggesting an alternative one of being most able to analyze and implement social policies conducive to human welfare.

                  Now, if that’s “pompous,” “quixotic,” or whatever other label you wish to attach to it, then so be it. But the ultimate political arena is the human mind, and that is the arena on which I am most steadfastly focused. If I win in House District 28, I will take that focus with me to the state legislature. If I lose in House District 28, I will take that focus with me to whatever other vehicles for affecting our collective existence are available to me. And I will continue to do my best to encourage all other reasonable people of good will, particularly those most committed to affecting our world for the better, to do likewise.

                  There’s a lot more at stake in our political process then the small battles that define any given legislative session: There is the much larger issue of how well we liberate our collective genius to serve our collective welfare. We cannot afford to lose sight of either of those levels of the challenge we face, because the larger one is comprised of all of the smaller ones, but it is also much more than the sum of its parts. Our current tendency is to lose ourselves in the skirmishes. We need more voices within the political arena reminding us that we can aspire, that we can apply imagination as well as analysis to the challenges that confront us, and that we can do much, much better.

                  Log in to Reply
                  1. Log in to Reply

                     1. accepted archetypes. The stability and continuity of our social institutional framework is based, in large measure, on the attempt of most people in most roles to try to emulate expected archetypes, both in how they perform their role and in what they produce, Photo journalists, for instance, when photographing a house fire, try to take the picture that is most similar to the archetype of “house fire” rather than the picture that is most particular to this house fire.

                        Politics is full of such archetypes, such as the archetype of “candidate.” Successful candidates only marginally try to differentiate themselves from other candidates: Most of their effort is engaged in trying to emulate the archetype of “candidate.” These archetypes have some value, but they are also very conservative forces, maintaining rather than challenging the status quo on a very deep structural level.

                        I’m a “progressive” on a very fundamental level: I am not just committed to marginal advances in how well our social policies take care of our individual and collective needs, but also in deeper structural advances in how well our social systems seek out and implement such policies. Such deeper structural advances require a gradual redefinition of the political process. It requires challenges to our status quo assumptions of what it means to be involved in the political process.

                        There is no  magic bullet which can shake things up in a fundamental way, and challenge both our archetypes and our habit of reinforcing and reproducing our archetypes, but each non-conformist who breaks with the accepted model (particularly when in thoughtful ways) adds something new to the mix. We have plenty of conventional candidates: We can use a few more who deviate from expectations.

                        You wrote above that offering to engage a poster in conversation regarding an issue he had raised is “better” than raising money and convincing voters. I agree with you: It is better. I’m not ignoring the former, but I do prefer the latter.

                        Again, I am not challenging anyone to a primary, or preventing anyone from having the Democratic field to themself  in HD 28. So there is no cause for concern. Being “a hoot” isn’t necessarily such a bad thing to be.

                        Log in to Reply

                        1. I write in many of my missives that I believe that reasonable people of good will can and should work together to make an ever more robust, sustainable, and fair social institutional framework. As someone trained in economics, I recognize, for instance, that markets are highly robust at producing wealth (though also at producing negative externalities), and so believe in utilizing that dynamic wherever it is most appropriate.

                           Our political system, however, is not very robust at producing mutually beneficial social arrangements. This is due to a number of factors, including the virulence of blind ideologies (at both extremes), but also (and perhaps more so) the ritualism entrenched in non-ideological political operations. I am not referring to formal procedures, but rather informal rituals of thought and conduct which permeate our political discourse and processes.

                           We would benefit from having candidates who talk about social institutions, who talk about norms and ideologies and markets and hierarchies, who talk about our habits of thought and conduct, who reach with their imaginations and analyses and knowledge base to seek out innovative ideas. We would benefit from having candidates trained in a variety of relevant disciplines and with a breadth of relevant experience who would have to be pretentious (that is, would have to pretend) to succeed in sounding unpretentious to a host of commentators with issues of their own.

                           The particular ritual evident on this thread, that of sniping angrily at people who bring what they have to bear to the process, because they offend some arbitrary sensibility, does nothing to improve the quality of representation or participation in our political process. In fact, it does much to drive people away.

                           Log in to Reply

                           1. You’re the only one who keeps responding…to yourself.  

                           2. that consists of, for instance, “jeffco pols” trying to define me with the statement that I keep responding to myself on this thread, even though I responded to myself exactly as often as “jeffco pols” did (and not one time more).

                              And, of course, I wasn’t “responding to myself”: I was formulating a line of thought. I took advantage of the topic that you initiated (and that I agreed with) in your Jeffco Line to discuss in a public forum some observations about our political process, a fairly inoccuous thing to do. Your response was to instigate and pursue a pissing contest (which, by the way, sort of blows the illusion of disembodied authority that the whole “jeffco pols” plural personal noun thing is supposed to maintain). While all of my posts were simply the pursuit of a line of thought, written in the style I’ve always written in, all of yours (and Twas Brillig’s) were something akin to childish taunts. That ritual evident on this thread.

                              The ritual that was also evident in the ridicule heaped upon another poster for becoming angry for being mistakenly included on your Jeffco Line. Regardless of the merits of her reaction, the reflex to ridicule, to seek to entertain yourselves at someone else’s expense, is an example of the ritual that I’m referring to. It’s mean-spirited. It’s counter-productive. It’s a gathering of ill-behaved children whose parents are out for the evening.

                              You’re right, though: This thread had only a relatively mild hint of that ritual. It is, nonetheless, pervasive on this and your parent blog (though “Colorado Pols” itself, at least while posting as “Colorado Pols,” is more careful to maintain the disembodied-authority illusion), as well as all over the blogosphere. In fact, many thoughtful people, and most elected officials most of the time, avoid participating in conversations on these blogs for exactly that reason. If it weren’t for this ritual, this reflex of ill-will, you would have much of the General Assembly, and virtually all candidates, involved in conversations here. As is, they know to avoid this “great big mud pit.”

                              As I said on Colorado Pols once, it’s exactly like the angry right-wingers shouting people down in public forums. It’s the same mood, the same intent, the same quality, essentially the same thing. And it’s a pervasive part of our political climate, one which you seem eager to contribute to.

                              Here’s an alternative possibility: Respect people for engaging in thoughtful political discourse, and for participating, with an eye to the public good, in the political process. Let them speak, and engage them in courteous conversation. Exchange ideas, debate issues, discuss the merits of various points of view and various proposals. Accept differences in style and variety of personalities. Be reasonable people of good will.

                              Now that’s a ritual worth cultivating.

                           3. Demand it all you want (and martyrdom isn’t the path to respect either).

                              And no one is “angry.” If anything, you are too precious to boot! I love it how three teasing words elicits thousands of words of think-skinned ranting all gussied up in self-important gibberish. I think it’s hilarious.

                              Don’t you go changing now.  

                           4. thanks for proving “our” point.

                           5. made for this stuff. If he can talk that much. Go Steve! Sorry, I do like Kerr though so you’ll have to try hard to get my support. ’10 elections still far away though

                           6. steve.harvey.hd28@gmail.com, and give me a chance to work on you between now and then. In the meantime, please visit my campaign website at http://www.steveharveyforcolorado.com.

                              Whether I’m “made for this stuff” or not, I do like working with people to devise, discuss, analyze, advocate, and implement good social policy ideas.

                           7. The Linda Auburn ridicule diary to which I referred above, posted on both Colorado Pols and Jeffco Pols, by Jeffco/Colorado Pols, has been removed.

2. REMOVE MY NAME from you Jeffco Line, I am NOT running for Jefferson County Commissioner.  I have a child to raise without a father and you people have added stress to my life with putting this LIE in print.

   I have a wonderful job as a Teacher’s Aide in Jefferson County schools and you may have put my job in jeopardy with this lie.  

   Repeat, I am NOT running for any office.

   My husband Dave Auburn was a good and faithful servant to the people of Jefferson County.  Dave was the Best Corporate Manager this county ever could have and the people of Jefferson County chose not to re-elect him.  Jefferson County’s loss and my and our son’s gain.  

   I demand a public apology from the person who printed this lie and an immediate retraction of my name from this site as a candidate.
   

   Log in to Reply