Forum's Objectivity Questioned
I was happy to attend a candidates' forum last week at Glendale's Town Hall, which gave me confidence that Glendale and the Princeton City Schools will be in reasonably good hands no matter what the outcome of the local races that will be decided early November.
The event did make me wonder about the sponsorship, though. It was put on in this case by a coalition between MoveOn.org, Occupy Wall Street, and GOFACT, which claim to be non-partisan voter-education organizations, but are actually closely aligned with a particular party and a narrow set of policy options. Since these organizations chose the questions the candidates answered, we were treated to the usual boilerplate:
-- how to opt out of the ridiculous testing spiral that's ruining the public schools that work and doing nothing to improve the ones that don't;
--whether we can pool Glendale citizens to purchase health insurance;
--how to induce hugely profitable corporations like GE to support the local schools;
--how to take advantage of the linguistic gifts of immigrant children in our schools to teach foreign languages in the primary grades;
--how much of the greenbelt we should plant with cannabis for the dispensaries and the Amsterdam Cafe on the square;
--whether Glendale should impose a tax on calls that go through the architectural gem that Cincinnati Bell built on Sharon Road.
The event made me wonder if the electorate might be better served if forums like this one were sponsored by truly neutral organizations, for instance the Glendale Tea Party. The result might be a outside-the-box discussion of innovative ideas for dealing with the challenges that face us, ideas that people might not have had much chance to hear, such as tightening our belts and keeping taxes low. Just a thought.
