It’s real easy to be “outraged” about politics today. It’s easy to post a scathing tweet or a Facebook update. It’s easy to retweet a link to a Salon.com article or to troll the social media account of the NRA or Fox News Channel or a lawmaker. It’s easy to grab an Uber with your friends and go down to a protest–standing on a corner holding a sign that was printed for you and yelling chants. It’s easy to talk about your beliefs in a group of people that all agree with you and cheer for your every statement. It’s even easy to do a TV interview with sympathetic reporters about how you were “inspired by the injustice of our society to be ‘part of the change’”. It’s easy to do all of those things and yell “This is what democracy looks like!!!”.
You know what’s hard? Actually becoming part of the democratic process. It’s hard to approach total strangers and ask them to sign a nomination petition. It’s hard to cold call people that you don’t know and ask them for campaign contributions. It’s hard to give up your evenings and your weekends for six months to walk through neighborhoods and knock on doors. It’s hard to spend nights researching budgets and existing laws so you can answer questions about more than just the one or two things that interest you. It’s hard to have people challenge your beliefs face-to-face–outside of “safe spaces”. It’s hard to debate someone on a range of issues in front of an audience judging your every response. And it’s hard to accept that what you believe to be the right thing for your community and country can be rejected by the majority of your neighbors.
That is a lesson that erstwhile Assembly candidate Charisse Daniels learned this month. Daniels gained some national notoriety when she was featured in a CNN report on female candidates “inspired” to run for political office by President Trump’s victory in 2016. Like others in the story Daniels claimed that she “woke up” the next morning to find herself in a country that didn’t “share her values”. She was perfect for that storyline: a young, African-American woman living in a solid red district in the state that effectively put Donald Trump over the top in the Electoral College. CNN likely planned follow up coverage of her race against incumbent Republican John Jagler–and they likely hoped–a major upset in November representing the “major shift” in American politics.
But then came all of those “hard things” that I mentioned before. Actually, just the first “hard thing”: getting a minimum of 200 nomination signatures to appear on the ballot. Daniels apparently wasn’t willing to put in the work to get that done–so she took an illegal shortcut, she just forged and made up signatures. The fact that neither she nor her attorney chose to testify before the State Elections Commission this week–and that the Democratic Party of Wisconsin isn’t claiming racism in the challenging of her petitions–leads me to believe that everyone knew that no effort was made to do things the right way–and Daniels just happened to get caught.
It’s a good thing that the “Greatest Generation” was in charge of things in the 1960’s when we put a man on the moon–because President Kennedy’s challenge “We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard” would fall upon deaf ears today.
