STRAW POLLS

Well, you didn't think I was going to post to this blog and NOT mention the WHEN straw poll, did you? Yes, I won....so I am going to enjoy my 15 minutes of fame. There will be setbacks in this campaign and when they happen I will have needed to enjoy the peak moments to get me through the troughs. (Have I mixed enough metaphors here? ) This time the order of candidate answers was varied so we got fewer "me too" answers. I think the most interesting question was "What have you done in your life to reach out to people who were different from you?" Really makes you stop and think, which hopefully is what these sessions do. If we all just repeat our stump speech, none of us will learn much. People are always asking "How is it going?" I tell them it's going well, and I actually believe what I'm telling them! What I recognize is that I get energy from meeting people and experiencing their participation in the process. There really isn't anything like Democracy to make your heart go pitty pat. I also had my first standout with my friend Alice at a local Post Office. It was fun meeting people and, again, some really good questions. The problem, of course, is I tell people what I think, rather than waffling. And so you can see this funny look come over their faces like "that's not what I wanted you to tell me...." and they wander off. People CLAIM they want to hear it from the horse's mouth. And they probably do. But anymore we don't have a tradition of respecting that on some issues, reasonable people will disagree. Question is: Is there a group of voters out there who are willing to cast their vote for a candidate with integrity, who's willing to listen to differences of opinion and who is willing to be honest about where she's standing at the moment? We'll see.