For those of you who are supporting me, now is the time to stand up. Tell two people to tell two people. Pay no attention to the Mason-Dixon poll or the endorsements. This was all decided in the past.
All hell’s breaking loose between Riley and Gregorie. We can slide right in the gap. This arguement proves everything I said about special interests. Nothing is straightfoward. No one is telling the truth. That’s why I have the backing of those on high in both the Democrat and Republican circles.
I am owned by no one.
I am talking to you who have stayed home for the past four elections. You didn’t have a choice. You do now.
I am a native, As a historian and writer, I have been able to parlay my knowledge with a frame of reference unmatched by no one, including Joe Riley, to my understanding the needs of my beloved city. As a journalist, I have grown increasingly mortified at the picture of a municipal car wreck. I could have sat on the sidelines.
I didn’t.
This has been a brutal year personally. I lost my aunt Patty Farrow whom I adored in March. Six weeks later, I lost my mother who was my best friend, who stuck by me through all my mistakes. Her death is more complicated than you will ever know. In June I was diagnosed with invasive skin cancer — the kind that if left untreated would have killed me by the 2012 election. I underwent radiation all summer.
This race has kept me away from my best friend and the closest I have to family.
I could have bowed out with grace four times. I had an excuse.
I could have played the victim.
I didn’t for two reasons.
The first is that I was the victim of nothing. Life is something that gets in the way of your plans.
The second is like unto it.
I have lived Joe Riley’s facade for 30 years. As a journalist, I know the dark side. I tried to unveil it and lost a perfectly good health plan and retirement for my troubles.
I have sniped from the sidelines like a Chihuahua for a generation.
I was about to fade away. In one instant 5:30 am one cold December morning all that changed.
I saw Joe was running for a last term. I could no longer let it stand. I had to run with the big dogs. I became a pit bull.
Say what you will, but I have stayed in this race because of my ideals. I do have an alternate theory of the crime as it were.
Don’t you find it interesting that Joe’s campaign will spend at least a half a million dollars for a $150,000 a year job? People say we don’t need term limits? Joe is the poster boy for term limits.
Those of you who have lived here before Hugo know. You gave up 16 years ago. It is you to whom I speak when I claim to speak to the displaced, the dispossed, and the disenfranchised. You watched in horror and disgust as your dreams were sloughed away, distilled by the Orwellean ministrations of man so enlaced with special interests and a love for power that he can outright lie to the media and they buy it.
I hear all these people on the tv warn us that if Joe is not reelected, that without his wise ministrations, things in the city will go terribly awry, the earth will go crashing into the sun. Has no one given any thought to the fact that this is allegedly his last term? I guess we now know that the world won’t end this New Year, but end in January of 2016.
You deserve better.
That sounds like a cliche or a talking point. It is. It’s also true. We deserve better than a mayor who ignores the will of the people and passes arcane liberty-constraining ordinances with the skill and duplicity of Harry Reid.
I have been accussed of being strident. Not so. You mistake stridentcy for urgency. This is the first and last time in a generation that we, you and I — the people struggling just to get by — have a chance to to take our city back, to reclaim our mantle of proud citizens who deserve a voice instead of paying all your taxes, fees and fines to build grand monuments to self-importance that make the rich and beautiful look caring and cultured.
You deserve better.
There are defining moments in people’s lives. They are moments like being kind to a clerk only to find that person is an off-duty cop. They are moments when you didn’t take the time to lock the back door and come home to a house cleaned out down to the brass tacks.
This Tuesday is such a day. It is a day you will look back on and say, “That’s it. That’s when I could have changed everything.”
You’ll be swamped in traffic for the fourth time in a week, already late to a very important meeting you think, “What could I have done? Surely, there had to be something.”
Your business plans are put on hold because city regulators delay your plans for an ice cream store despite your following their instructions to a “T.” Rumor has it that some alert reader just happened to be browsing through the SC ethics website (and who doesn’t?) and saw that you gave to my campaign. You also gave to Joe’s, but there is disloyalty that will not go unnoticed. You think, “What more could we have done?”
It’s a month from now. Your car is filled with Thanksgiving groceries, the kids are getting cranky. You are sitting at the light on President and the Crosstown. In the downpour, you watch in horror as a “wonnerful” palmetto tree is uplodged by the rising water. Your car stalls and, as a truck splashes brackish waves over your car and the kids are in full bore, You think to yourself, “What could I have done?”
Elect me.
I share your vision. I have done my part. I have stepped up.
Your turn.
