No Names, Thank You.

Today a man stopped me in the parking lot and asked me why a political leaders had to be so antagonistic and aggressive against each other. I told him that politics is very personal.  Even though a lot of people say they’re going into politics and will rise above the negativity, I find they’re the first ones to start the name calling.  I actually find this election relatively calm compared to some previous elections that I’ve encountered. 

I was never involved with politics until I was nominated and running.  I had never gone to political meeting until my own nomination meeting.  I didn’t really know how to campaign or anything else about politics.  However, I had good people around me to help.

One problem I encountered in the first campaign was that my Liberal opponent’s name was Dennis James.  I had friends whose first name was Dennis and I had friends whose first name was James.  I was very much afraid I was going to call Dennis James…James Dennis.  To me, that would be disrespectful and embarrassing to both him and me.   The solution to avoid making this mistake was to never say his name.  I went the entire campaign without saying his name once.   

In my next campaign, I decided to do the same thing, even though my opponent’s name was easy to remember.  Then in my next seven campaigns I did took same approach. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never said the name of my opponent in any campaign in public.  As part of the campaign, I did compare policies and parties, but it has never been personal simply because of “Dennis James”.

Interestingly enough, Dennis James was my opponent in my first campaign. In my last campaign Dennis James was my Campaign Manager. Even though we were opponents in that first election campaign, we always remained in touch and respected each others’ ideas and views.   Still do.