Thoughts about carpetbagging…
11 minute read
September 26, 2022, 9:00 AM
Lately, I have had very mixed feelings on the subject of carpetbagging when it comes to congressional races. First, though, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, “carpetbagging” is an American term that was historically used to describe northerners who came to the south following the Civil War, and who were perceived to be exploiting the local population for their own gain. The term comes from their luggage, which was typically a traveling bag made out of scraps of carpet. In modern usage, it is generally used to refer to anyone who is running for political office in an area where they have no local connections. Among others, Hillary Clinton fits the modern definition of a carpetbagger when she ran for a US Senate seat in New York, as she had never been a New Yorker prior to her running for the Senate.
The reason that I have very mixed feelings about carpetbagging comes from two people who have a history of running for Congress, and who have had varying results. Additionally, I feel cursed by being able to see the issue from both sides. Of the two politicians that I’m thinking of, one of them is David Trone, who has represented Maryland’s sixth district in Congress since 2018. The other is Jennifer Lewis, a politician from Waynesboro, Virginia who has become something of a perennial candidate, having unsuccessfully run for Congress in Virginia’s sixth district in 2018 and a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2019, and who is now is running in the sixth district again this year.
In the case of David Trone, the sixth district was not his first rodeo when it came to congressional races. Trone first ran for Congress in 2016, when he ran for the eighth district seat, which was open that year after incumbent Chris Van Hollen declined to run for his House seat again in order to run for the Senate to succeed retiring senator Barbara Mikulski (he ultimately won). Trone ran in the Democratic primary for the eighth district, which was a nine-way race between a bunch of politicians whose names I won’t bore you with because unless you live in Montgomery County, you’ve probably never heard of any of them and never will. I lived in the eighth district at that time, and I recall having voted for Trone in that primary, because he seemed reasonable enough. He finished second in the primary behind Jamie Raskin, who took the nomination with 33.6% of the vote to Trone’s 27.1%. For a nine-way primary, Trone did respectably, but with this being a first-past-the-post system in a single-member district, Raskin advanced to the general election, and Trone was eliminated. I figured that would be the end of Trone, politically, since Raskin would probably hold the seat for a while, and Trone would return to the private sector and his Total Wine & More business.
Continue reading…Categories: State and local politics
A question about what is okay to critique…
3 minute read
September 19, 2022, 12:04 PM
This is something that happened back in November of last year, and it’s something that I still question because it leaves something unsettled that I had previously considered to not be a question at all. My understanding was, when it comes to a person’s appearance, the only things that are okay to to critique are hair and clothing, because those are choices that the person made, and that they can readily change. That comes with a lot of caveats, though. You don’t critique things about hair if it’s something that they can’t change, like baldness, though anything that they can still change is fair game. Likewise, with clothing, you wouldn’t criticize the fashion choices of someone who clearly can’t afford anything else.
So, with that said, here’s why I ask. Last year, I was off on Black Friday, and Elyse had planned an adventure for us on that day. She planned a shopping adventure that day, and she wanted to go out and check out the “doorbuster” events. Me, having spent four Christmases working in retail, I wanted nothing to do with any of it and would have preferred to just sleep in and work on the website or Flickr, but I wouldn’t have gotten a moment of peace if I stayed home – so out I went. We chose to go to Annapolis so that I would have something to do, with the idea of my going out to Sandy Point State Park to fly the drone over the water while Elyse shopped. Unfortunately, however, when I got to the park, I judged the wind to be far too strong to fly, so the drone never even came out of its carrier. After sitting in the car for a while feeling annoyed about the circumstances, having driven out to the bay for nothing, I headed back to the mall, feeling somewhat defeated, and met back up with Elyse and joined her on her shopping adventure, because nothing was going up into the sky other than my frustration.
Categories: Annapolis, Retail, Social media
Thirty years ago, we arrived…
18 minute read
September 5, 2022, 6:10 PM
August 31, 2022 marked 30 years from the day that my family came to Virginia, after having lived in Arkansas for the previous seven and a half years. Thirty years is a little less than three quarters of my life thus far. It just seems so weird to think about it that way. But it really does mark the beginning of an era in my life, because unlike more recent moves, the move from Arkansas to Virginia was a clean separation, leaving a lot of elements of my life behind and starting new in Virginia, especially in those pre-Internet days, when there was no social media to keep in contact with everyone. Additionally, having no family out there, I have not been back since we left. The moves since then were not quite as clean of a break as the move from Arkansas was. My 2007 move to Maryland was only me, and my parents stayed where they were. Plus, as it’s only a few hours away, I can go down there almost any time I want, including down and back in the same day. Then my 2017 move was local, so nothing else changed in my life other than the location of my house, and my commute to work. I just upgraded my living situation, and that was it.
The move to Virginia was the culmination of something that was a long time coming. My parents never really wanted to live in Arkansas to begin with, but it was a good career move for Dad with Scott Nonwovens, so they begrudgingly did it, and so we left New Jersey for Arkansas in February 1985. I remember Mom’s mentioning a number of times early on about wanting to move back to New Jersey. And in all fairness, that was understandable. Dad had something to do in Rogers, as he was the one with the job. Mom didn’t know anyone, and her primary role at that time was to take care of a newborn and a preschooler. She had left everyone she knew when we left New Jersey, and it took a while to meet people and form new relationships, though that improved once Mom got a job at the Walton Life Fitness Center in Bentonville. We also didn’t get along with our next door neighbors on one side, as their kids were out of control. That ultimately led to something of a falling out. We put slats in our existing fence on that side so that we wouldn’t have to see them when we were in the backyard, and they built an entirely new spite fence on their side so that they wouldn’t have to see us. The neighbors on the other side were a retired couple, and they were awesome.
Meanwhile, the education situation in Rogers had really come to a head. I had just completed fifth grade, which was my worst year from kindergarten through high school, without question, and that had followed third and fourth grade years that were pretty rough as well. My parents had gone about as far as they could with the school system, and no one was looking forward to another year at Bonnie Grimes Elementary. I was also hearing all kinds of rumblings at the time from my parents about changes afoot. One was that we would not be returning to Grimes Elementary again, and I was also hearing things about moving, which made me think that something big and life-changing was coming, but nothing concrete as of yet. It had been rumored that Scott had wanted to transfer my father to their corporate office in Philadelphia, and so it seemed like we would probably be moving back to New Jersey, as Mom had wanted all along. I didn’t want to move, because unlike my parents, Rogers was pretty much all that I knew, and I was used to it.
Categories: Arkansas, Childhood, Middle school, Stuarts Draft