Manipulating The Voters

To the Editor:

I’m writing in hopes of persuading people to stop enabling the annual political game that attempts to guilt-trip me into supporting the town budget by threatening insane cuts to education budget if I vote No.

Every year, the town officials put everyone through the same fire drill, and every year, they are enabled by pro-education supporters’ well-intentioned but ultimately self-defeating single-issue tactics. This process is exactly like the classic National Lampoon cover with a gun pointed to the head of a dog, with the caption: “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.”

Unfortunately, the pro-education supporters annually let themselves get manipulated into representing the dog in this political game. And every year they lose — the education budget keeps getting cut until enough parents are mobilized to vote Yes. 

You can see why politicians like this game. It ensures that a large percentage of active voters — mostly parents — will support any budget proposal, because they end up as de facto single-issue voters. 

However, I don’t understand why pro-education supporters let themselves be used in this way. The end result is always a loss; the education budget always gets cut in the process.

So for going forward,  I’d like pro-education supporters to consider an alternate political strategy: instead of letting themselves get forced into a knee-jerk pro-budget stance, work with watchdogs, such as Kevin Fitzgerald, so that only budgets that responsibly address noneducation issues without gutting education get passed.

For example, imagine an alternate to this year’s situation: if the pro-education voters had early on agreed to support the items the No voters rally around, such as the anti-town hall items, in exchange for support of such-and-such an education budget, and both sides agreed to vote No until a budget that represented both of these goals was presented in a referendum, the education budget would have been higher in the end!

Most Yes and most No voters share the same aims. Most of the Yes voters oppose the new town hall and the town officials’ recent arrogance of power; most of the No voters do not want to gut education. And yet the terms of the referendum game have created an artificial wedge between them, with the education budget annually being successfully used as the wedging tool. 

Anyway, I hope to someday have the opportunity to vote for a budget that is pro-education and pro-fiscal responsibility. That would be the best thing for the children and the taxpayers who get hurt by this annual process.

George Szabo

165 Berkshire Road, Sandy Hook                                    June 4, 2007