Al Clark: Voting Tuesday the best way to respect candidates' sacrifices

The season holds promise, with school fully under way, the county fair and Halloween come and gone and starlings coalescing on the power lines along Greenville Boulevard. Now Election Day looms just ahead. It's time for us to choose.

As always during an “off-year” election, there has been much discussion of the lack of “major” races to be decided and the likelihood of a light turnout. Such votes are not front and center on the public's agenda and tend to float into and out of awareness — that's for most people, but not so for candidates and newspapers.

From where I'm sitting, in fact, this election has had plenty of passion, anger, sweat and tears. When it's this local — where the candidates live next door or down the street, where they can visit your home or office or call you on the phone or see you in the grocery store — you have to take it personally.

One way this happens for us is the practice of endorsing or recommending candidates, a practice that has long been a part of newspaper tradition in this country. We have done it for many years here at The Daily Reflector.

The philosophy behind it is simple — the newspaper does what any well-intentioned voter would do if the time were available. Representatives of our news and editorial page staff (this year the group included our publisher, editorial page editor and city hall reporter) sat down across the table from the candidates, talked to them, asked questions, got to know them a little.

And after thinking and talking it over, the publisher and editors made the choices.

Our editorial page editor then wrote the recommendation pieces, giving readers a chance to see our thought processes, absorb and assess our facts — all to help readers as they make their own decisions.

These endorsements are especially difficult in local races. Our candidates, both the incumbents and the new faces, have for months put their hearts and minds into their work and their campaigns.

For the incumbents, there have been years of personal effort invested already. They have endured countless complaints and calls and arduous and seemingly endless meetings, often punctuated with contentious debate.

For the new faces, it has been a long climb into an unknown and not necessarily welcoming environment, where issues and emotions sometimes swell beyond what a proper perspective might suggest is appropriate.

In short, it takes committed and caring individuals to take on the challenge of running for local office, especially when victory and defeat are equally likely. And for us, it is not easy to recommend one and reject another when they all deserve the highest measure of their community's respect and gratitude.

But in the end, elections are about choices. When you write about them, that's what you're writing about. We feel the paper serves a purpose by making these choices, informed ones. Whether readers agree with them is irrelevant.

We feel that by putting in the time and sweat equity required to cover these campaigns and go through the endorsement process, we are adding something of value to the public debate about issues and showing candidates the respect that all of them deserve, whether we recommended them or not.

Now the choice is yours. Dismiss us if you like, but not the importance of making that choice.

Al Clark is executive editor of The Daily Reflector. Contact him at aclark@reflector.com.