Reflections on Running for Local Office: Get Used to Disrespect

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The hardest thing to get used to for someone new to running for public office is going from your job, your leadership positions, your family, where you get a lot of respect, to an arena where your opponents on a whim treat you with utmost disrespect. The character assassination takes a three-dimensional human and turns him or into a shade of what the people who really know him think of him.

I’ve treated my opponent, Bill Llewelyn, with utmost respect. From what I can tell, he’s been civil to me. Boys in my scout troop are very interested in the fact that I’m running for election. One of the things they ask me is who I am running against. So I tell them: he’s a local businessman, he owns a printing business, and he’s a football and baseball coach. He might even be THEIR coach. I don’t want them disrespecting him, so I make sure I talk about him with respect.

I’d like to say I have always run my campaign in a way that I could defend in front of my own son. But I’m not made of Teflon. I’m not a professional politician. I am just a local guy who has lived here for going on 20 years, works on Wall Street, has been involved in scouting for most of the past 20 years, and has been a religious educator for about 34 years. I’m not used to the disrespect some have shown me. I’m doing my best to be able to shrug it off. Maybe I’ll get there.

I guess under the surface, I feel righteous anger at what the Republican Party has dragged our country through in the past year: the Big Lie, the Capitol insurrection, libertarian pandering to anti-maskers and anti-vaxers. I see what goes on in the Republican stronghold in Texas, where growth primarily in the minority population caused the state to gain two Congressional seats, and yet a white majority figures out a way to gerrymander seats away from people of color. I’m married to a person of color. My two sons, Jeremiah and Elijah, are mixed race. I feel indignant on their behalf.

Here in Connecticut, I would think a lot of Republicans are probably just as annoyed with the direction their party has gone in as I am. I have been a Democrat ever since I could vote, but I worked one summer for Republican Lowell Weicker when I was in college. I’ve always admired the mavericks like him: John McCain, John Kasich, and on the Democratic side, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. It’s strange we call these people mavericks, because they are the most centrist. They realize, like I do, that while one party or the other can pass conservative or liberal legislation while they have a majority, no one can really govern from the left or the right. Thus, Obamacare was subsequently evisercated by a Republican president and Congress. Our foreign policy direction shifts schizophrenically every time there’s a change of party in the White House. Our foes abroad have learned to weaponize this via social media. They are using our own most prized civic right – free speech – to bring us down.

Republicans in Fairfield have done the same thing. I’m probably the most “out there” of the Democratic candidates: I’ve spent real money on advertising and I’ve knocked on hundreds of doors. That makes me a target. One person twisted my message in my KnowYourReps.org interview, in which I talk about my financial markets experience as something the board can use. She said I was deliberately misleading voters about the finance experience of other people on the Board of Finance. But “finance” and “financial markets” are not the same thing, or if they are, it would be news to people who work on Wall Street. The ad was clear on this, and yet she engaged in an ad hominem attack where she said I wasn’t living up to the Scout Law that I mentioned in the interview – “A scout is trustworthy.” This and other social media attacks tend to use the same formula: “I was going to vote for you until…” It’s a pretext, and I’m hoping voters see it for what it is. It is supremely ironic that people who voted for the most verbally abusive president in history should express canned outrage at a Democrat who doesn’t take their nonsense lying down.

One of my ads features my bulldog Mochi. The caption reads that Fairfield needs a bulldog to watch over town finances. The analogy is apt. Bulldogs look tough, but they are loving, sweet and quiet. Still, they can be provoked. As a really kind man I met while out knocking doors said to me: "Dogs are good at teaching each other manners."

In my real job in a hedge fund in New York City, I’m the quiet one. I don’t speak for the sake of having my voice heard. I sit and listen and analyze during investment committee meetings, and I speak up when I have something that I think may add to the discussion. That is how I plan to serve on the Board of Finance, if elected. Debate for the sake of debate is a waste of breath. I will analyze, listen, and vote the way my mind and heart direct me to. I’m as tired of empty barrels making noise as the next guy.

The Republican side is running hard on a two-prong negative platform: 1. The fill pile is the fault of the Democrats; 2. The Democrats are obstructionist. A current BOF member, Lori Charlton (who also has national financial markets experience as a retired Deloitte partner), has already thoroughly debunked the obstructionist argument. In the League of Women Voters debate, Republican BOF candidate Tom Collimore must have mentioned the fill pile four times. I called him on it. The BOF has been Republican dominated for at least 25 years. The three-person Board of Selectmen was Republican-dominated as well. If they didn’t see the fill pile happening, then it shows that we need to beef up internal controls. People like Lori Charlton and my running mate Craig Curley are experts in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance in the financial world. They can deploy that expertise in town government too. As Ronald Reagan once wisely said, "Trust but verify."

The Republican Town Committee would like you to believe that any Democrat, whether he was active in politics or not, is part of the problem. So, to all my fellow Democrats in Fairfield, be on notice that they think it’s YOUR fault too. As a voter who has split his ticket more often than not, I find these allegations pretty divisive.

Finally, I want to talk about a real issue: education. Jim Walsh made it a point of pride at the League of Women Voters debate that he has cut the Board of Education budget’s request most years. We have kept education spending increases down to about the rate of inflation, i.e., 2-2.5%. That sounds good on paper, but it ignores actual needs, as well as mandates from the state. If the state requires us to spend more money supporting special needs children, then education spending should rise faster than the rate of inflation. If kids are sitting in 95-degree classrooms in September, May and June, then spending needs to rise. We are one of the wealthiest towns in the state but we rank 66th in terms of per pupil expenditure. We are a big town, so we will never need to be at the top, but we can do better.

The conservative side argues that they want to keep Fairfield affordable for multi-generational families. Yes, I do too. A lot of my neighbors in Stratfield fit that description, and I hope I can keep them as neighbors. But we can’t do this at the expense of our kids. We can’t give all older people a de facto tax subsidy at the expense of Fairfield’s children. (We can give this to some, though, and that’s why Senior Tax Relief exists.) If Fairfield is going to remain affordable to the next generation, they’re going to need to qualify for good jobs that can pay them enough to live here. To some extent, controlling affordability of life in Fairfield is like trying to pilot a Boeing 737 from seat 35B: there are a lot of factors outside of our control. But one tool in our hands is education spending. We can’t sacrifice the future of young people entirely for the sake of people whose financial decisions have already been made. Meanwhile, since Republicans like free market solutions, they can try doing what I do: give financial support to your parents. My wife and I support her mom as well as mine, and we’re happy to do it. And as a side note: one of my neighbors works as a paraprofessional in Fairfield schools. She makes $14.50 an hour. How is she supposed to find Fairfield affordable?

One of my favorite movie quotes is from the Martin Scorcese film The Departed, where someone asks the Mark Wahlberg character “Who are you?” Wahlberg answers, “I’m the guy doing his job, you must be the other guy.” It matches how I feel about running for office: I’m the guy doing his job. There are a lot of the “other guys.”

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