Different ways of remembering that politics is local

Some cleanup issues on the elections:

We completed our schedule of endorsements a week and a half ago, considerably earlier than previous elections. We wanted to time our recommendations so they might be useful to early voters, and that's a more complicated project than you might think. It required tracking down nearly 700 candidates for about 170 contested races, and then, almost immediately after their filing deadline, getting questionnaires to them and returned.

Electronic communications make the process much more manageable than it was years ago, but it was still not realistic to complete it before early voting began on March 14. We were able to start, though, more than a week before that and complete the process within a week after early voting began.

Now, for those of us traditionalists who still like the patriotic atmosphere of formally voting on the appointed day, we'll revisit our endorsements with summaries to be published on the editorial page Sunday and Tuesday. The summaries will also be published online and available for you to study anytime.

If you've been following our letters columns, you've been reading endorsements by many of your friends and neighbors in local races they consider important. We do our best to publish all the letters we receive — as long as they meet standards of taste, space and originality — but inevitably, we're inundated in the final weeks.

We impose a Friday-before-Election Day cutoff to assure there's time for a response in the unlikely event of a letter slipping through that makes a false or unfair claim about some candidate that would need to be addressed before the election. So, as the deadline approaches, you've no doubt noticed us stacking up letters on the Opinion page and in some of our Neighbor editions.

Even so, we'll surely have more letters than we can publish by Friday. Of those that don't see ink and pulp, we'll get as many as we can into digital form on our website. I encourage you to check them out, along with our endorsements and those of other organizations you respect, as you contemplate your own choices for leaders who will determine the direction of your parks, library, schools and community in coming years.

Finally, in the short space I have left today, I want to be sure to call your attention to Kerry Lester's three-day series earlier this week on suburban congressmen getting to work in Washington. In two days of the report, Lester showed vividly how Peter Roskam, of Wheaton, has quickly climbed into a Republican leadership role in the House and the challenges he confronts trying to make a difference. Then, she focused on freshman Rep. Joe Walsh, a McHenry Republican, and his somewhat unconventional approach to making a difference in ways he thinks important.

With municipal and school elections approaching, I couldn't help thinking of the late U.S. House Speaker “Tip” O'Neill's famous epithet that all politics is local. The issues that municipal and school leaders deal with can seem very different in scope from those addressed by state or federal lawmakers, but ultimately they all come back to something similar: friends and neighbors engaging in efforts that affect our communities, our pocketbooks and our quality of life.

If you didn't do it already, you have a chance to participate in that process next week. I hope our endorsements and your friends' and neighbors' letters help.

* Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.