Silly Season Is Here!

This November there will be both a mayoral and a council election. A few weeks back I saw my first political ad for the season. It was an ad for John Cranley and the entire add was dedicated to bashing his opponent, Roxanne Qualls. I hope this does not set the tone for the entire campaign. C’mom John. If you come out of the gate negative, the entire campaign is going to be negative. That gives Roxanne a leg up. Now she has the choice of either coming back at you with a negative ad, or she can take the high road. Of course, she did not. She retaliated with a message about Cranley’s ethics. In all fairness I have to admit, my research my be flawed. I do not know for sure which candidate drew first blood. But it does not really matter. They both jumped in with both feet to the political muck and mire. 

Since we are in “silly season”, I decided to conduct an experiment to judge the social media acumen of the politicians. I went to each council member’s facebook page and submitted a friend request. Here are the results:

• Charlie Winburn, Pamela Thomas, and Wendell Young all accepted my friend request within several days of my request.
• P.G. Sittenfeld Chris Seelbach, Yvette Simpson,  and Laure Quinlavn have ignored my request. Laure was requested over four months ago. Since she was subject of a former blog I felt it was only fair she be given adequate opportunity to see the blog and respond, should she so desire. I do not know if she saw the blog, but I do know she did not respond to either the content of the article nor to my friend request.
• Christopher Smitherman must be a real popular guy. When I attempted to friend him Face Book notified me that he had reached his 5,000 friend limit. I sent him a Face Book message notifying him that I made the attempt, but that was not responded to. I also sent him an email letting him know I could not friend him, and that he had not responded to my Face Book message, and that too was ignored. He may be popular but obviously not interested in what people have to say to him.
• Roxanne Qualls does not have a personal Facebook page so it is not possible to submit a friend request. All you can do is “like” the page. The result of this is that if you “like” the page, anything she posts on her wall will show in your news feed, but anything you post on your wall will not appear in her page news feed. Kind of one way, don’t you think?
• John Cranley, though not a council member, is running for mayor so I submitted a friend request to him, and it was responded to in a few days. 

In all honesty, I do not have a dog in this fight. Only city residents can vote for mayor or council. That seems a little lopsided as the bulk of the people in the city are transient. That is, they come to the city to work, they come to the city to play, but they have no say in how the city is run. But that does not mean the transient population cannot express themselves. And I think we all should Tell the mayor and council members what you want for the city. You do not need to be a resident to express your opinion. To facilitate this, I have linked each council persons name to their home page on the City of Cincinnati Website. There you will find their email addresses and office phone numbers. Give them a call or send them an email and tell them what you think. Particularly Christopher Smithermen. See if he will respond to you.

Those are my thoughts, what are yours?

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