Candidate forums are the most well meaning, but least informative public exercises I can think of.
It is rare indeed when I have
come away from these meet and greet, too often style over substance public discussions with any useful knowledge.
I include the three televised debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which did not allow the people to understand policy positions on matters that matter. The national media poured gasoline on the flames of spectacle by asking personal questions and then evaluating the whole showdown based on personal qualities such as being relaxed or being nasty.
That said, I was disappointed Monday night when I attended the Dorr Township forum for seven candidates for four township trustee seats and two for the treasurer’s post. We didn’t really learn much except once again John Tuinstra and Josh Otto don’t like each other.
This is not to be critical of Dorr Library Director Natalie Bazan, who did her best as moderator, but also was talked into having this non-story occur at all. The only people who stood to gain from this were the No Party Affiliation (NPA) candidates, who wouldn’t have been included in such a show before the primary.
But forum fails are more common than successes. It’s extremely difficult for a candidate forum to be informative and help undecided voters make up their minds. And most of the people who show up in the audience already have made up their minds.
Perhaps the worst candidate forum I ever witnessed was in July 1994 before the August primary of that year. It was held at the historic Thomas Jefferson Hall in Hastings and was hosted and moderated by Jim Pino, chairman of the Barry County Democratic Party and one of the nicest persons I ever knew.
Unexpected guests at this event were unloaded from a bus at the TJ Hall parking lot, and out stepped more than just a few “candidates” for a variety of offices, from state senate and state rep, to U of M Board of Trustees, to drain commissioner, to State Board of Education. They were legitimate because they were Natural Law Party candidates for offices on the ballot that would be marked by Barry County residents.
I counted 27 candidates for office at the forum that was to last for an hour and a half. That’s about three minutes apiece for each candidate.
So Pino gave each of them three minutes to go to the podium to talk about themselves and say what they stood for and against.
State Senator Joanne Emmons wasn’t particularly pleased that she’d get only three minutes to talk about her campaign for re-election. And there were seven candidates for state representative not pleased about it as well.
There was no back-and-forth debate exploring differences on issues, just self-promoting short speeches. And too many of them were made by people from the Natural Law Party, none of whom I have seen nor heard from since that day. They all spent a lot of time telling everyone they needed to do more meditating, that politicians were too uptight and should chill out.
This is what I learned about this party on Wikipedia:
“The Natural Law Party of Michigan (NLPM) was established as the Michigan affiliate of the national Natural Law Party, which was founded in 1992 in order to ‘bring the light of science into politics’ and oppose the political influence of special interest groups. Though the national party disbanded in 2004, the NLPM has remained active in Michigan. The party does not adhere to a specific platform and allows candidates to run for office according to their independent principles.
“The NLPM has supported a number of presidential candidates, including Socialist Party candidate Walt Brown in 2004, independent candidate Ralph Nader in 2008 and Justice Party nominee Ross ‘Rocky’ Anderson in 2012. During the 2014 election cycle, the party nominated six candidates for local, state and federal offices. Three NLPM candidates earned more than 16,083 votes in partisan races, which allowed the party to maintain ballot access through the 2016 elections.”
The NLPM somehow managed in 1994 to take advantage of nice gentleman like Jim Pino and wreck havoc on a local candidate forum that had good intentions, but turned out to be a fiasco.
I was moderator of a candidate forum once, and I was proud to say the two candidates for prosecuting attorney showed those who attended the serious differences between the two. The obviously weaker one, however, won the election.
So I wondered why I even bothered to take time to move forward on such an effort.
Forums, despite good intentions, too often are overrun by slick politicians able to dance around questions, by media more interested in telling the people what they want to hear and by political hacks who lie and hide their toadies from the harsh light of reality. They are a mirror of just how low our former republic has sunk into the abyss of fantasy, marketing and public relations.
No surprise here I disagree with the author of the column. The Candidate Forum held in Dorr October 24th was not only well moderated, we agree on that point, but informative. Three of the eight candidates were folks I had never met and the forum provided me the opportunity to hear them explain the direction they want the Township to follow.
The questions were not gotcha questions but good common sense questions designed not to generate controversy but to inform the voters about issues important to the good folks in Dorr. Not a lot of headlines came out of the forum but a lot of information did.
Ok Trustees Tuinstra and Otto did cross swords a bit but neither were insulting or angry.
All things considered the forum accomplished its mission. All who attended, or read the article in the Town Broadcast reporting on the forum, are better informed and can cast a more knowledgeable vote.