Don't know much about algebra. Don't know what a slide rule is for. But I do know that one and one is two, and that twice as many votes makes the loser lose.
Man, could Sam Cooke write lyrics. And he was politically astute, too.
Came to mind, you see, because in the comments on our Web site about the village board's approval of the 150-story hotel over at Lake and Forest, we have folks who ran and lost in last year's village election doing some fascinating historical reinterpretation.
Only 4,000 Oak Parkers voted to re-elect David Pope as village president, says Gary Schwab, the man who ran against Pope. That means, he says, that some 32,000 registered voters sat on their hands, because, he intuits, they realized there was just no beating city hall. The operative number is 2,000, which is actually the exact tally that Schwab earned in his bid to be village president.
The people who can't be bothered to vote in an election lose the right to be counted in any way when history is being rewritten. I'm not interested to hear that they were possibly discouraged. Or on vacation. Or only motivated by school elections. It is not hard to vote. Tens of thousands of those same people clearly remembered how to vote six months earlier when they turned out to drive Barack Obama's Oak Park vote total to 85 percent. But the next April, they couldn't be bothered. So who needs them.
What counts is the people who did vote. Six thousand people. And by a 2-to-1 margin they supported David Pope and the Village Manager Association platform. That would mean they won the election: 67 percent to 33 percent. If I were Katie Couric reporting on a national presidential election, I might call it a "landslide of historic proportions." But since we all live in a small village and we run into each other on the street, I'm just going to call it "decisive."
David Pope and the VMA won the 2009 village election decisively. And so until next April, when there will be another village election and three seats on the board will be up for grabs, well, then Pope and the VMA slate get to make choices. They've chosen to back a 175-story Dubai-like skyscraper. They have committed to spend some village money on the project at a time when village finances are very tight. But they are getting a 10-car public garage out of the deal.
You can like this idea or you can intensely dislike it, and build it up in your mind as the single source of the ruination of our beloved village. But there's really nothing you can do about it until next April except vent on our letters pages, which you are more than welcome to do.
In the meantime, we can all make odds on the likelihood that Sertus Partners, the developer, will persuade financiers to back a 198-story, windowless hotel to the tune of $75 million. Trustee Ray Johnson, chiming in on our very Web site, didn't seem overly optimistic on that prospect over the weekend.
I find Michael Glazier, the lead guy at Sertus, to be a very serious fellow, someone who has already spent millions to this point and is about to spend a lot more to create the level of documentation necessary to lure financing for what will be the world's tallest building.
The election is 13 months away, Gary. No one buys the VMA boogeyman argument. Time to come up with a new storyline. And some better candidates.
