Local Election, Part 4: Election Day and Its Consequences
Mitch Hartley, County Commissioner
This is the last of a four part series about an off year election for county commissioner in our northern Michigan community. Things went sideways almost immediately and were righted only when the candidate Mitch Hartley was elected and set about working on the commission. The following details the last few months of the campaign and Hartley’s subsequent work on the commission. For previous reports: Part 1 here; Part 2 here; Part 3 here.
As the boredom of blue skies and warm breezes faded into the shorter, cooler days of color season, a late model Subaru perched on the side of one of the peninsula’s highest inland roads. From this vantage Mitch Hartley could see for miles in all four directions. Sweet and tart cherries were behind us, but farms now started to buzz in anticipation of apple harvest. They mowed the grass in the lanes between the trees for a last time this calendar year, followed by trailers full of eighteen bushel apple crates, unloaded at regular intervals. Yards were full of equipment, and last minute repairs and preparation were in full swing. In a matter of days the orchards would be loaded with pickers.
Mitch explained to confidantes that he was the most surprised of all when his candidacy as both a Republican and a Democrat went forward. It wasn’t like he allowed it to move forward like some college boy ruse, just for the laughs; he thought, actually believed, that eventually wiser, cooler heads would prevail and the whole thing would be scuttled and actual candidates chosen to run against each other. That this never happened was reality’s infamous dope slap, and not only for Mitch. Nor was Mitch a completely reluctant candidate either. While he never thought to run a real political race before, the thought of being ‘in office’ had often occurred to him. Once the ball got rolling there was little Mitch could do or say to interrupt its inertia. “Once you plant your orchard, you’re committed, every year, to the seasonal management of it,” Mitch told friends in a rare moment of metaphorical insight.
But like he had done all his life, Mitch straightened up pretty quickly, especially after the district experienced the nose clamp mania, and he got an earful from his wife Dr. Sherry about how disgraceful it was for his candidacy to arouse such behavior, “even at the senior center!” That conversation definitely put a exclamation point on the fact that the candidacy was real and Mitch needed to take it seriously and run a campaign he and the district could be proud of. There were a few missteps, like the lawn signs that advertised Mitch as a ‘Country’ commissioner, as you’d expect from a rookie candidate, but Mitch eventually came around as a ‘serious’ candidate with some ideas on how the county should go forward. The average voter’s rage eventually simmered down to cynical anger, “to hell with all of you,” and eventually evolved to annoyance and finally to amused acceptance, “what other county has a ‘progressive libertarian’?” Whether beside a pole barn, and at one of those crossed leg wine and cheese meetups, everyone shared a chuckle eventually about the unusual candidacy of Mitch Hartley, while also admitting that “he’s not the worst candidate I’ve ever seen.” However for the elite voters, the campaign never reached the level of drama that they had hoped. A nose clamp fight, or ‘reddy’ as they became known, provided a small spark of interest, but besides that there was no other real scandal, sex or otherwise, to pique their interest. The election once held such promise of real fireworks for them, they were sadly disappointed at how humdrum it turned out. They became quickly bored with the whole affair and turned back to their own traditional lives.
Mitch never picked up any endorsements; in fact, as an unopposed candidate, endorsements never occurred to him. This was mistake that Mitch admitted after the election when it became clear that many voters simply passed up the County Commission line on the ballot because their polestar, whether the Chamber of Commerce, or the local Women’s Group, never gave Mitch ‘the nod’, as they call it. Mitch of course still collected enough votes, but there were several write-in candidates who also took home some votes. A group of local wiseguys who spent the better part of their waking lives before the brown bottle came up with the idea of writing in ‘Lenny Chien’ which 67 of them did. It surprised everyone that 67 of them actually made it to the voting booth.
The Local Media
It is with no small amount of chagrin that we report the dubious role of the local media in this election. Of course they have been accused by partisans, as if they were referees at a ball game, of calling fouls where there were none, and missing other obvious fouls, but their real sins were of omission and tone.
Somehow the roles of the Glasses, Deedee and Dick, and Lee Bingham, the Democrat and Republican kingmakers respectively, were never uncovered by our intrepid reporters, though these three had their hands in this offal pie up to their elbows. And when letters to the editor of the local paper asking about this omission went unanswered and unpublished, the whole district responded by noting a “foul smell in the air.” Deedee normally had a table of 8 for the end summer art show and wine extravaganza, but unable to find compatriots to fill out an eight, she attended with her eldest daughter and the two of them sat together at a deuce, imbibing a fair amount of chilled white wine on a very warm day. They left before the proceedings really got underway, leaning noticeably on each other. Lee Bingham, for his part, became a recluse. Normally the divorcee was the life of the peninsula party, but he was only seen once the whole summer, looking over the meat counter at the local grocer for the special hamburger that our man Mitch had already secured. Locals at the barbershop pointed out that all three of the key players, Deedee, Dick and Lee, were often featured in past editions of the paper, smiling broadly at one charity event or another. Suddenly all three went missing. The bet is that next summer they will re-appear as if nothing happened. I’ll take the over.
When the media did give the election a moment’s notice it was with the air of ‘take your medicine’, as if the average voter was somehow responsible for what unfolded. For the first several months the election was always front page and subscriptions increased at an incredible pace, peaking during the nose clamp mania when the paper reported on each individual ‘reddy’ as if it were a sports contest, even declaring winners and losers, and going into great detail about the suffering of individual ‘clampers’ as they were called, with photos to boot. Reporters raced around the peninsula following reports of a reddy, hoping to get there in time to witness at least some of the squalid affair, take photos and interview locals about who won, lost, etc. One sensed it was more cheerleading for mayhem than journalism.
After the mania subsided and it became obvious that those most responsible for the election would once again escape any responsibility, newspaper subscriptions, by all accounts, took a nose dive, and amazingly the paper responded by simply not mentioning the election at all. It was an act of “unremarkable courage” locals said, and to this day the media have not bothered to explain their actions; “above the fray” became their new slogan.
Election Day and Afterwards
Voting day came and went without even a murmur of an issue. Media types walked around and took photos of the normal lines but found no one interested to say something mean or contemptuous about the voting process on the peninsula. Like always our small population always runs into someone they know, whether at the grocer, the beach or the voting precincts, so voting was also a friendly social occasion. They delivered the ballot totals to the clerk’s office at 8:30 that evening, Mitch was declared the winner of his race, and there you have it. When all was said and done, there were a lot of people who felt like fools after getting carried away during the whole fiasco, and for that everyone felt badly. There were stories of families that no longer spoke because in the prime of the hoopla words were exchanged, and now it was hard to pull them back, a sad fact about words. The local newspaper has yet to find its footing and a couple of reporters were laid off in light of falling sales. It was hard to get a haircut without hearing about some ill effect of the election. One story that made us all shake our head was that Deedee Glass was in alcohol rehab.
In early January Mitch took the oath of office to serve the county to the best of his ability, and then he took his place on the commission. As a former business executive, Mitch was good with numbers, contracts and negotiations, and he was a patient man who always took an opportunity to help others on the commission understand the issues before them. He asked incisive questions that laid bare pretty quickly any tomfoolery before it cost the county real cash. Department heads learned quickly that he was not a soft touch for out of budget revenue requests. Mitch was also adept at putting together voting blocs on the council when he sensed something especially nonsensical about to come to a head. One example was a $250,000 machine for grooming cross country trails. Most skiers didn’t require groomed trails but there was a group of 60 or skiers, not especially avid or good, who wanted a more professional course for themselves because, as in all matters they pressed, they deserved it, and were willing to take names if it didn’t happen. Mitch quickly put together a tight argument including the real cost of the machine with maintenance, and personnel to run it, that added another $25,000 to the annual budget. The council voted it down 9 - 0. People noticed, as this was the first time in a long while that this loud group had heard a resounding NO on any issue. They normally had their way, or with a little bullying procured it.
As for the Progressive Libertarian Party, whatever it was or wasn’t is no longer a question. “It was just a formality,” Mitch told a group at the barbershop, “but we’ve got to start spending money on county wide projects, not the whims of this or that group.” If that was the main thrust of the new party, just about everyone was for it.
For his part, Mitch has found a way to make himself useful and sharpen some old skills. While he was stressed during the campaign, he’s been his old self since the vote, and newly energized since taking his place on the council. He and Sherry were spotted at a 50’s era fundraiser for the local VFW, actually doing a bit of karaoke. Mitch sang the following lines and got a roar of support from the crowd:
Even boys with two left feet Come out alright if the girl is sweet
This concludes our report about the unusual election of a county commissioner in the year of our Lord 2023. We’ve done our best to corroborate the facts at every turn, and bring only those facts we had true confidence in to your attention. So it is with a heavy heart and hand that we apologize for one assertion made in the first of our reports. Mitch Hartley did not have a ‘liquid lunch’ and drive drunk to the county clerk’s office to register officially for the county commissioner race. We learned a hard lesson on account of that error, and pledge to never repeat it. We will bring further reports of Mitch’s term on the commission whenever an issue comes up that makes sense for us to investigate.