Candidate session: What you say here won't stay here
Actual excerpts of e-mail discussion among Daily Herald staffers. Names redacted to protect the guilty and to avoid getting ahead of the story.
Editor 1: “As several of you already know, the (insert government here) is a really tough one this time. I would appreciate any feedback. Candidate Soandso vows not to be a one-issue board member, and is actually at the top of my list. I'm open to arguments against that.”
Editor 2: “If Soandso did the homework and strikes you as knowledgeable and well-prepared, his/her background certainly shouldn't be a strike against him/her. In fact, many, many incumbents will tell you they got involved because they were mad about something.”
That's how things sometimes go in this business of endorsing candidates. We invite candidates in all contested city council, village board and school board races to meet with us face-to-face for about an hour, maybe more in some instances, to discuss their candidacies, how they're best qualified for the office and the key issues in their races. All of these sessions are “on the record,” meaning, as I like to tell the candidates I meet, “Anything you say here can and will be used against you in a newspaper story of our choosing.” The reporter covering the particular race is there to do those stories.
Obviously, other things are taken into consideration: the stories we write about the races, what we know about the candidates from prior elections, or in the case of incumbents, how they've conducted themselves in office. We also ask them to fill out detailed questionnaires. Their answers can be viewed on the community pages of dailyherald.com; we also have been publishing them in the Neighbor section.
But sometimes the give-and-take among people familiar with the candidates is a helpful tool in coming to a decision. And our recommendations, by the way, are ultimately approved by our editorial board. The process is overseen by my fellow columnist Jim Slusher, our assistant managing editor/opinion, but every editor at this paper, including Executive Editor Madeleine Doubek and Senior Vice President/Editor John Lampinen, is involved in the process.
I'm finishing up interviews with candidates in Naperville, Wheaton, Lisle and Oak Brook. The sessions have been enlightening and invigorating. It's easy to become cynical about politicians these days, and I'm sure we'll be writing stories in the weeks and months to come that will fuel some of that cynicism. But I also have to tell you I come away from these sessions with a feeling that there are some pretty sincere, intelligent people who want to run our local governments for no or little pay and not necessarily a lot of praise.
A couple other quick observations about our candidates:
• As Editor 2 said, it really is common for someone to get involved in local politics because his/her ox was being gored by government. For instance, one Naperville candidate reminded us this week that he was motivated to run for city council in the 1980s because of the division of north (old) and south (new) Naperville. There was a perception that the established part of town comprised the haves and the south-side newcomers were the have-nots.
• Some of these ox-being-gored issues never really go away. In Lisle, there's much candidate talk critical of how the incumbents on the village board conducted hearings on the move of Navistar's corporate headquarters to the village. The clear implication is the opponents' voices weren't being adequately heard. And one of the incumbents got his start in politics over the hugely controversial plan more than a decade ago for a Meijer store to be built near residential areas. His complaint: Residents opposing the project were not being heard.
Our endorsements begin running in Sunday's paper.