Turning A Corner

Aristotle once said politics and teaching were “noble professions.” That might still be true for teachers, but he wouldn’t recognize the most basic political campaign these days, and he’d struggle to find nobility in it.

That’s true at the national level, but it’s sadly trickling down to the most local level imaginable. If the two recent races for East Hampton and Southampton village government are any indication, local politics is at a low point.

In East Hampton, it’s about perspective and proportion. The 2020 race for mayor really began in 2019 — April 2019 — which means Jerry Larsen’s successful campaign lasted a full year and five months. It involved a campaign manager (who now calls himself, without obvious irony, the “chairman” of Mr. Larsen’s “transition team”), and a fundraising effort that eventually topped six figures. That sparked a fiscal arms race, as his opponent had to scramble to raise money to keep up; at one point, a political action committee was even involved to counter the fiscal juggernaut.

Mr. Larsen won, and he brought his entire slate to the Village Board — a vindication of his commitment and passion. But is this a healthy precedent for future village races? Must a candidate for Village Board or mayor prioritize fundraising? What will be the impact of money flowing into these local races at this pace?

It also hints at an alarming tendency toward self-aggrandizement that towers over the actual job at hand. Before local mayors start asking for “Hail to the Chief” to be played upon their entrance to meetings, and Village Board candidates hire consultants to craft an aggressive set of TV ads, maybe it’s time to lay down some ground rules for future village races.

There’s no denying the passion on display in the races in both villages this year, and there’s no reason to doubt that all the candidates simply want to do what’s best for their villages. That is, ultimately, the motivating factor in seeking any public office.

But voters should demand ideas. A village race, even for mayor, isn’t a personality contest — it should be a marketplace for voters to pick the future of their community. To do that, they need more than empty platitudes. Your village needs a sewer system: How does the candidate pledge to make it happen, and how do they envision paying for it? The business district needs help: What, precisely, do they plan to do?

In the future, voters who sift through campaign literature and find it bereft of specifics, even humble ones, should steer clear of those candidates.

A village election is something out of Americana, so there’s plenty of room for boosterism and talk about the village’s attributes. There is no room — none — for unpleasantness. There seems to be no decorum left in any level of government, but if it’s truly lost at the village level, that’s a tragedy.

Voters should hold attack ads against the attackers in the future. There is no reason for scorched earth tactics in a race among neighbors, which is what a village election is. In Southampton Village, the winning side attacked the family of one candidate and misrepresented facts in an ad with an apocalyptic tone. But the nadir of the Village Board campaign in Southampton was reached when the winning party put out a flier with a sophomoric doctored photo adding about 50 pounds to an opponent’s girth.

Such infantile tactics have become far too common in Southampton Village lately — Mayor Jesse Warren can point to the crude graffiti targeting him on a public art project — and it’s a sign of disease. Voters, moving forward, should closely scrutinize not just messages but tactics, and hold the candidates accountable.

Finally, let’s put it plainly: The day of political parties at the village level should end. If candidates want to team up to run together, so be it. But grafting the divisiveness of political parties on what should be the most independent, egalitarian of democratic exercises only contributes to all the worst impulses.

2020 will go down as a watermark year for so many reasons. Let’s make it a year when village elections turned a corner away from the kinds of hostile tactics that are sure to carry over and create divisions, and toward an acknowledgment that public service — at its most basic level — must not be a zero-sum game, with nothing out of bounds. The voters, ultimately, must be the referees, and penalize for unsportsmanlike contact.