The 2007 Elections in Arlington: What Conclusions Should We Draw?

Saturday, December 1, 2007

(ACDC)

Report from the Chairman

Peter Rousselot

It’s tempting—and I am enthusiastically going to succumb to the temptation—to congratulate all Arlington Democrats on the results of the November 6 elections. Headlines in our local press, such as “Democrats Sweep County Races” and “Break Out The Brooms” accurately describe the breadth of our victories locally.

We should be equally proud of Arlington’s role in helping to re-take Democratic majorities in the Virginia State Senate and significantly cutting into the Republican edge in the Virginia House of Delegates.

Our wonderful Democratic candidates, our 2007 Joint Campaign, our Precinct Operations team, the Arlington Young Democrats, the 21/51 effort and all of the volunteers who helped them share credit for these sweeping victories. Please take some time to “smell the roses,” and savor how lucky we all are to have the vibrant Democratic Party that we have here in Arlington.

The greatest single key to maintaining our electoral success is to approach that task in a constructive, positive, and optimistic way. We work best as a Democratic community when we try as hard as possible to learn all of the reasons why a fellow Democrat might have a different opinion or strategy than we do, and reflect carefully on their point of view before deciding for certain that we prefer a different path. A constructive competition of ideas is always healthy, but knee-jerk nay saying is not.

As of January 1, 2008, Arlington Democrats will control every single elected office in Arlington. From the standpoint of Democratic Party success, you can’t do better than batting 1,000. It just makes common sense to conclude from our recent elections that the voters of Arlington have once again decisively and overwhelmingly rejected what the Republican and the Green parties stood for. Basically, our voters weren’t buying what they were selling this time around.

However, with total electoral success comes total governing responsibility. In a community with a $1 billion dollar budget, and community demands for capital projects that collectively exceed our annual resources to finance, comes a special responsibility to develop the most open and transparent processes possible to make decisions that cannot by definition satisfy everyone in the community.

Particularly when Democrats run everything, we must lean over backwards to be sure that important public policy decisions are made in the open by the Democrats who were elected to make them, not behind closed doors. And, in a challenge to all of us, we must develop and refine these processes so that they do not “take forever” to reach a conclusion.

Retaining, strengthening, and enhancing the “Arlington Way” of citizen engagement is vital. Allowing the “Arlington Way” to degenerate into a facsimile of a college dorm bull session is something that our community cannot afford.

PETER ROUSSELOT