Eventually, you will support someone who wins, and this will make you look important. By “support,” I mean allow your name to be used as an endorser of a candidate. You can do more (see below), but allowing your name to be used in the candidate’s brochure is all it takes. If you are really anxious to be politically connected, allow at least one candidate to put up a lawn sign on your lawn. (Putting a sign in your window might help, but lawn signs are what it is all about.) Attend a candidates’ forum. Shake hands with at least one candidate. It doesn’t matter who, because all the other candidates will want to know who you are, and will want to shake your hand, too. Attend a candidate fundraiser. Contribute whatever the minimum entrance fee is, maybe $10 or $25. You will have to put something in writing so that you will go into their database, because they are required to disclose your contribution under city law. Leave early, don’t eat anything. God knows how long that stuff has been sitting out getting rancid. Don’t shake a lot of hands. Except for the candidate, it might even be helpful to be mysterious to other guests. (Who was that woman? Why is she getting involved in this campaign?)
So far, so good. I have asked you to do nothing hard, nothing in fact that will cause you to even burn any calories. You don’t have to say you like the candidate or why. You don’t have to go to any endless planning or strategy sessions at some stranger’s house where they serve awful food. Two things which require actual effort:
1. Write one of those phoney Letters to the Editor that appear at election time in all the local rags, including this one, extolling some courageous personal stance your candidate took, or the time he or she took to nurse a wounded animal or help an old man or lady cross the street at great danger to him or herself. This requires making something up, embellishing an actual event, or confusing your candidate with Abraham Lincoln. It also requires you to write something (possibly spellcheck it because the newspaper certainly won’t), pay for a stamp and look for one of the ten mailboxes that the United States Postal Service has left in our community, and deposit the letter. In fact, the most difficult part will be finding the newspaper’s address and a postal carrier who has ever heard of it.
Careful About Straining Yourself
2. Walk a precinct or part of a precinct with a candidate or his precinct walkers (try to avoid a hill). Too much exercise can kill. As I will explain below, these actions, many of which hardly qualify as “action,” will catapult you to the top of Culver City politics. Any of the above actions will have a greater effect than having a multimillion-dollar business in town, like Jonah Goldrich of Goldrich and Kest, making thousands of dollars of contributions to candidates, being president of the Chamber of Commerce, being an assemblyman, congressman or County Supervisor, or taking a full page ad on a candidate’s behalf. Trust me. Just look below at the numbers.
Let me explain the numbers. First, there are 40,000 residents in Culver City. Many are children and can’t vote. Many are not citizens and can’t vote. A few, we don’t know who, are convicted felons, on probation or parole. They have been unable to renew their franchise to vote. Unlike most small cities, none of the last category is actually on the City Council.
Of the 30,000 people who actually could register to vote, only about sixty percent, or 18,000, actually register to vote.(By the way, certain religions actually prohibit you from even registering to vote, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.) This seems strange to me. I cannot understand anything sacrilegious about registering to vote and voting. I associate the right to religious freedom with the right to free speech and the right of freedom of association. I pretty much see a religion that prohibits you from voting (as opposed to letting you decide whether to vote or not) as the equivalent of a religion that won’t let you eat chocolate or root against the USC Trojans.
Down to the Thousands
Of the 18,000 who are registered to vote, only about 6,000 vote in the City Council elections and only about 3,000 vote in the School Board elections. (The last School Board election was an exception because some of the Democrats who came out to vote against the Austrian ballot measures, stayed and voted for a School Board member.) If, in a city of 40,000, only, say, 6,000 people vote, they are in the upper fifteen percent of the politically empowered people in the city. And don’t kid yourself. The candidates and their supporters know who those people are, where they live and whether the neighborhood is a “high turnout” neighborhood. I contacted both a School Board member and a City Council member. The School Board member got about 300 endorsements in her race; the City Councilwoman about 600 in hers. Taking the higher number, if you registered to vote, voted, and endorsed a candidate, you are now in the upper 1.5 percent of the politically powerful people in the city. If you put up a lawn sign, you are in the upper one percent. If you made any contribution, no matter how small, to any candidate, you have now arrived in the stratospheric level of the upper .5 percent of the Culver City political elite.
Finally, if you actually participated by putting up balloons, or signs, or help take names at a fundraiser or political event, or actually walked all or part of a precinct, you are probably in the top twenty politically important people in the city of Culver City. If you contributed, endorsed, walked or helped, you have seen and spoken to the candidate and the candidate remembers you and loves you like his own mother just as much as he now despises his pre-campaign “friend” (golfing buddy, co-worker, neighbor) who did not help. When the Councilperson reviews the voter list after the elections (and he or she will — you can count on it) and learns some of his or her “friends” didn’t even vote, the non-vote — especially the personally known non-voter — will be condemned to political oblivion. And guess what? If you follow my advice, your rise to power in Culver City will cost you almost nothing: Half a day helping, calling people to turn out the vote, telling the man where you wanted your lawn sign, a $5 contribution.
An Advantage for the City
Better yet, the city did not have to spend your taxpayer dollars to engage in some sort of expensive outreach program to get the so-called disenfranchised or disabled or uninformed or unassimilated or non-English speaking people to come out to vote. You did it yourself. You took responsibility. You wanted a say in how your community responds to your needs. The people who showed up for their candidate, for their election, and for their city, did so, with the most minute effort. Government didn’t have to drag them out. The people who cared were there. That’s what makes them the most important people in the city. The people who didn’t show up to vote don’t count because they don’t care. They never will. And there is nothing you can do to make them care. To paraphrase Yogi Berra when the New York Mets’ attendance started to decline: “If the people don’t want to come, you can stop ‘em.” Finally, if you follow my suggestions to become a political Big Shot in this town, and take these minimal steps to get involved in the community, you might actually find out more about your community. You might want to find out even more about how decisions are made in Culver City and by whom. You might feel better about yourself for making the effort. You might want to help make some of those decisions, and you might feel better about yourself and your city, because, after all, you helped make the city better.
Think about it.
Postscript
Mr. Gourley, who used to be cynical, served two terms on the City Council,1988 to 1996, including two years as Mayor.
