The Strange World of Local Politics

For most of my voting-eligible life, I've been a commuting student splitting time between two small towns. An unfortunate side effect of this arrangement is that I tend to be somewhat unfamiliar with what is going on in either location that I split my life between. Following local politics is especially challenging even now that I am interested in doing so. In a way, I feel like the Internet has hardly changed the way politics works in my hometown. The print version of the local newspaper is still the dominant source of local news, and candidates for local offices seem to virtually never set up campaign web sites. Although it is fairly common for candidates or supporters of the candidates to go door-to-door and leave pamphlets in their wake, finding information on local candidates is not always simple. "Pamphlets" is a rather generous term to describe what are frequently little more than a piece of paper with a photo, a name, and some family information printed upon it. Politics on a local level (well, in my hometown at least) certainly seems to be driven more, if not entirely, by personality rather than by issues, which in my view is not a good thing at all.

The fact that I split my time between two communities makes it somewhat harder to attend speeches or political events, which seem to be perhaps the most promising venues for learning more about a candidate's political philosophy. Personally, I'd much prefer to be able to go on the Web and read about the local candidates just like I read about the presidential candidates, but for whatever reason that is not an option. So, it seems like my only realistic chance to learn about each candidate is to read the local newspaper closely and regularly and perhaps quiz any candidates who happen to be canvassing my neighborhood. If I'm not home, the former task is difficult, and the latter task is difficult even when I am home as I'm actually a rather shy, retiring, "Thank you for the campaign literature" sort of guy. To be honest, I really don't much like candidates coming to my door which also explains my tendency to dismiss them quickly -- I want to learn about politics in a public space, but I want to keep my own private space private. Previously, I wrote about how I find some aspects of politics much more accessible to me than others; strange as it may sound, I actually find national politics to be much more accessible to me than local politics at this point. It is certainly more comfortable and convenient for me to access national political information than local political information.