We are having a typical Madison, Wisconsin problem – two nice liberals running against each other for mayor, and it’s hard to follow one of the rules for radicals, “Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.” Sam Brown, The Washington Post (26 January 1977), because the differences between the candidates seem to be mainly style.
Satya Rhodes-Conway is running against Madison mayor for life, Paul Soglin.
I went and listened to them both at a mayoral candidates forum at the downtown public library last night, and I still don’t know who to vote for, though I think I’m leaning to Satya.
They both kind of initially lobbed the question on race, “Is Madison racist?” Soglin first said, “I don’t see any racists here in the audience”, yea right, Paul; while Satya said, “I don’t think you can ask two white people if Madison is racist”, which got a much more favorable response from the crowd, but if you think about it, is equally empty. Both followed up by carefully talking about structural problems in education, housing, health care, that have lead to inequality locally.
So the biggest difference between them is that Satya is the voice of cool, correct, reason: I am willing to work with anybody, and we don’t have to like each other to work together, while Soglin retains his gruff demeanor, and wants to be able to call someone an idiot when he thinks they are, especially the county supervisor.
My problem is that years ago, I said I’d never vote for Soglin again, because one of the times he was duly elected, in 1995, he quit after a year to run for federal office, losing to Scott Klug, and then worked in private business until running for mayor again in 2003 – when he lost to Dave Cieslewicz. But now, 20 some years later, I feel like voting against him is ageist, part of the let’s sweep out those old baby boomers wave, and I could easily get washed out myself, by that wave.
To be honest, I’m worried about myself in the face of Satya’s calm correctness – I feel like she’s creating an environment where I would get dinged for my inappropriate thoughts and especially for any attempt at humor. There was a question about the Madison police, are too many innocent people getting shot (yes), do they have good policies for when it’s OK to use deadly force (no). I was kind of hoping that Soglin would mention David Couper, our last effective police chief (to my mind anyways) who was also trained as a minister, and believed in talking to people before shooting at them, but he didn’t. Satya’s example kind of bugged me – she said that something is wrong with our police because the white, college-aged daughter of a friend of hers is afraid of the police, and something must be wrong when a person that privileged is afraid. But when I was a white, privileged, college-aged young woman, I was afraid of the police because I usually had marijuana in my bag. And even now, especially because I work on campus, and have been though the active shooter, run, hide, fight, scenario too many times, I’m still afraid of the police. They, like everyone else, have too many guns. That’s what I would’ve liked to hear the candidates say – something serious about gun control – fewer weapons in everyone’s hands.
Mostly what I heard from both candidates about what they’d actually do in office remained fundamentally the same, so I’m kind of stumped. Good thing I still have a few weeks to decide.
I arrived 10 minutes before the start, and was in the overflow room, so nice to see so many people concerned about local government turn out. I saw the former director of the daycare John & Al went to, starting when Al was a baby and John was two. That was a nice treat for John’s 32nd birthday.
And PS had to go run an errand by car, and just heard a snippet of a school board candidate, Ali Muldrow, being interviewed, and in those few minutes I thought she said more meaningful things about race and inequality here than either of the mayoral candidates. Guess I’ll vote for her!
and PPS – although just remembered that Muldrow is the one who sends her kids to a charter school out of district … maybe I can’t vote for her after all.