When Herb Kelleher was starting up Southwest Airlines, he was asked which of the other airlines he regarded as his main competition. Kelleher replied that Southwest wasn’t competing with other airlines. It was competing with buses and trains. A lot of people didn’t normally fly, and those were the people he wanted to turn into customers.
There are a lot of people out there who don’t normally vote, often because they don’t feel like they’re being offered a real choice. (As Warren Beatty once said: ‘We don’t need a third party, we need a second party.’)
But every once in a while, there is a real choice. The people of House District 38 have the chance to vote for State Representative John Valera. And even if they end up not voting, or voting for someone else, they ought to go see one of his public appearances. (Unfortunately, there’s just one left, a candidate forum in Wilton on October 30.)
To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, let’s consider Valera’s participation in a recent candidate forum in Antrim. When asked about expanded background checks for firearm transfers, he turned the question back to the audience:
‘We already have background checks. How many people here, by a show of hands, have ever heard of the Gun Control Act of 1968?’ No one. ‘How many of you people have actually filled out a form 4473?’ No one. ‘You people are clueless. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re asking for new laws without knowing anything about ones we already have. As far as I’m concerned, if you have family members and friends, people who know each other, what they do with their firearms is their business. We don’t need any government interference.’
What about red flag laws?
‘One of my opponents talked about how he’s in favor of red flag laws. He said red flag laws are good so you can turn in people you feel are a threat. When it was my turn, I looked at him and said: Red flag laws are something out of Joe Stalin’s handbook.’
When was the last time you heard anyone running for office lay things out so plainly, and so clearly? Mark Twain once said: ‘When in doubt, tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.’
Among the confounded was Susan Conklin, one of the organizers of the event. The very next day she wrote a letter to the Keene Sentinel to complain about Valera, saying that ‘If his positions had showed some depth of thought and understanding, I might have been more receptive to his platform.’ According to Conklin, the way you demonstrate depth of thought and understanding is by expecting voters — and candidates! — to know nothing at all about the details or the history of an issue on which they’re demanding action.
Agree with him or not, Valera is worth listening to because he says things a lot of people are afraid to say, and things a lot of people really don’t want to hear. For example, consider his take on funding for public schools.
‘I think one of the things that’s happening is that the teachers union has gotten into a total panic around school choice. They really feel threatened by it. And they’ve decided that they’re going to stack the legislature with retired school teachers. My opponents — two of those retired teachers — went on and on about how we need more money for education. We have to reduce property taxes. So we need a sales tax and an income tax. The usual Democrat stuff. So I said, wait a minute. The thing we need to do first is to audit schools across the entire state and find out where all the money’s going. Enrollments are going way down, while costs are going way up, and the kids aren’t learning any more than when we spent a lot less. I’m sure there’s tons of wasted money. We need an audit to find out where they’re spending it, how they’re spending it. We probably also need to audit the teaching.’
What a concept: Before deciding how much more to spend, find out what you’re getting for the money you’re already spending. To some people, this is just common sense. But to Susan Conklin, this sort of thing is an example of ‘disrespect and incivility’.
Either way, it’s not the sort of thing you hear every day from a candidate for office. Neither is what he said in his concluding remarks, which were posted by Democratic State Representative Marjorie Porter. You have to strike some kind of nerve to get your opponents to inadvertently promote your campaign for you. (Go watch it. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.)
Whether he’s opening your eyes or turning your stomach, here’s something to know about John Valera. When he decided to run for office, he didn’t do what most candidates do, which is to get a list of likely supporters, and then focus on those. He ignored the lists, and knocked on every door — Republican and Democrat, Independent and Apathetic. He did this because he felt that if he was going to represent all the people in his district, he needed to know what all of them thought. And he felt that some of them probably needed to hear some things that no one else was going to tell them. To me, that sounds like the opposite of disrespect and incivility. Evidently, enough people agreed to send him to the legislature.
When the House is getting ready to meet, Valera stands in the back of the room and calls out: ‘Guard your liberty and property! The legislature is in session!’
He is perhaps the only member of the House who takes seriously the state constitution’s admonition that government officials are the ‘substitutes and agents’ of the people — not their leaders, not their rulers, not their bosses, not their keepers or protectors, not their nannies or surrogate parents. For that reason alone, we need 200 more like him in the House, and baker’s dozen in the Senate.
Ironically, it’s one of the reasons he doesn’t always attend sessions of the House — a point on which he draws criticism from people who think that government needs to be taking an even larger role in people’s lives.
‘The first year, I went a lot. Then I found out that the legislature is totally out of control. Last year, they had a thousand bills. Think of it, people. A thousand bills controlling, regulating your lives, and taking your wealth.’
It turns out that if you restrict yourself to dealing only with bills where the state is exercising a power delegated to it by the written constitution, you don’t need to spend much time in Concord. It’s why Valera proposes shutting down the statehouse for five years or so, or at least having a moratorium on new bills (other than repeals of existing laws). It’s the same basic idea as going to rehab to kick other kinds of addictions.
Have you considered running for office, but decided against it because your positions on the issues are ‘too different’ from the mainstream? If so, consider the lesson of John Valera: There are apparently a lot of people out there who don’t normally vote, but who are ready to line up behind someone who doesn’t just recite the same talking points as everyone else.
By addressing the people who weren’t flying, Herb Kelleher built Southwest into a successful airline. By addressing the people who aren’t voting, you could help John Valera build New Hampshire into a freer and more prosperous state. But you need to get busy getting elected. He can’t do it all by himself.
