This year, I have no financial stake in the outcome of any elections. I’m not working for any candidates and I’m not formally consulting for any candidates at this point. While at this time last year and the year before I was a student of political science, and could justify spending vast amounts of time on Virginia politics, I no longer have the luxury.
Yet I have this job of the Democratic races in Virginia. I get a call or an e-mail from a candidate or their staff a few times each day, asking for something. I get dozens of pieces of e-mail each day from various campaigns, a result of having been added to campaigns’ mailing lists. I gave up on following every Virginia political blog a month ago, but I still read a dozen of them, and attempt to comment on them and do my best to remember to go back and continue those discussions. I volunteer for campaigns here and there, stuffing envelopes or making phone calls.
I don’t mean to sound like President Bush, but this is hard work. It’s like I’ve got this a twenty-hour-a-week job that I don’t make a penny on. It’s not even an investment, like if I were working to build a house or something. Come November 9, this job is over.
Now, I’m very happy to be helping these candidates — so hey, you, candidate, don’t stop asking me for help — and I’ll hang in there for the next month. If I’ve told them anything useful (and I genuinely have no idea if a word I’ve told anybody has been useful), then I’m happy. And some of it’s a lot of fun. I’m on a panel at a conference down at Washington & Lee today, and I’m speaking to a group at UVa tomorrow.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the Virginia political blogosphere after the elections. Will it wither? Will it remain static? Will it grow, when 49.9% of the electorate angrily rises up and takes to their keyboards? My only forecast is that our total output will decrease, and we’ll improve our personal and collective signal-to-noise ratio.
I’m tired. Bring on November 9. We’ll write up our post mortems, reacquaint ourselves with our families, take a deep breath, and figure out what’s next.
Waldo,
dunno who you’re tryin’ to kid. You could be trapped under a fallen tree and the first thing you’d do would be to reach for your laptop to blog about it.
Writing’s in your blood. Just look one generation up for absolute incontrovertible confirmation of the fact.
givin’ it up?! don’t make me laugh.
Waldo, you make me happy inside. Because of that, I’m going to tell you something you already know, but would never write out because of modesty.
You are hounded because you’re good at this. If you weren’t, you would have been forgotten long, long ago.
…I’ve written the next paragraph about ten different times so far, and none of them feel right. So I’ll just leave it at this: I love the idea of you easing off, because I prefer a live Waldo to a dead one. However, Waldo Jaquith is an integral part of the Virginia scene, and as such needs to stay. I don’t know anybody else that can fill the role of the nude-victory-dancer at an NRA endorsement to a Democratic candidate.
~Joseph
You can have my two cents- will that ease the pain?
What group are you speaking to at UVa?
Couldn’t have put it better – I’m tired of this. I’m working a full time job and helping campaigns pretty much every hour of the day…I want to coach some soccer again, or play on my softball team, or go to a happy hour for god sakes!
Come Nov. 8th, I’m going to be a happy man no matter what happens.
Oh, c’mon. Like any of us could ever actually quit the political scene. Nov. 9 will dawn and the overwhelming majority of us will wake up, and realize that we already miss the people we volunteered/worked with. (although some of us might not manage to wake up until the 10th!)
And then we’ll run to our computers and blog about how we miss other people, and half of us will blog about how awful this is, and why everything will be going downhill from here, and the rest of us will be like, “WE WON!!!!” And then we’ll argue about it. I think that we’ll ease off a bit, of course, but I can’t see any blogs just dying off, or anyone not staying involved in politics in some way.
What group are you speaking to at UVa?
The YDs. I think. :)