YES to Proposal #3

Tomorrow’s Election Day and I’ve been hard-pressed to find any pro-“YES to Proposal #3” media coverage. There’s a solid, well-reasoned piece in last week’s Village Voice that includes this interesting counter to the argument that non-partisan voting harms minorities:

Unlike most major American cities with nonwhite and female voting age majorities, New York has elected just one black mayor, and no woman, Latino, or Asian mayor. In fact, Latinos, the city’s largest minority, have yet to hold any of the three citywide posts, and Asians, the fastest growing minority with 10 percent of the voting age population, are represented by a solitary member of the 51-member City Council. The city’s only black mayor was also the only Democratic incumbent in the 20th century to lose to a Republican challenger, with two of every three white Democratic voters deserting the party for Rudy Giuliani in 1993. So much for the empowering benefits of partisan politics.

as well as this jab to the notion that it’s intended to benefit Bloomberg’s re-election bid in 2005:

Bloomberg made the billionaire and other screeds even less likely when he changed his and the charter commission’s mind and allowed candidates to list their party registration on the ballot, giving voters under the new system a greater chance of responding to “cues” other than high-priced name recognition. Most importantly, the mayor retreated from his own onetime self-serving motive for this initiative by making the effective date 2009, meaning he can’t benefit from it in 2005.

That last point means I’ll be holding off my own mayoral run for the 2009 election and will instead focus on something more local, like taking over Oliver Koppell’s City Council spot.

In other news, NaNoWriMo is kicking my ass. I’ve got a ton of ideas floating around in my head that I’d prefer to massage a bit more before committing to “paper” but that completely contradicts the spirit of the thing. Also, finding the time to write is next to impossible as I’m limited to late-nights and early-mornings, both of which have their downsides. Two days in and I’m already roughly 8 pages in the hole! Regardless, I’m keeping at it and am heading over to Battery Park now, laptop in han…um, lap?

Write on!

Written by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Content Officer for LibraryPass, and former publisher & marketing director for Writer’s Digest. Previously, he was also project lead for the Panorama Project; director, content strategy & audience development for Library Journal & School Library Journal; and founding director of programming & business development for the original Digital Book World.