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What happens if he catches the car? |
A friend described Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp's election win in November in terms of 'the dog catching the car'. The implied question being, 'Now what'?
When I was a youngster, I had a crush on a girl named Priscilla Lawrence. She lived near the three-room Township school and I saw her every day. When her parents broke up and her mother moved a few miles away, I would ride my bike to see her almost every day after school.
There was a dog at a farm on the way that loved to chase cars. And kids on bicycles who crossed his turf. He would come from nowhere it seemed and chase me for a couple hundred feet, nipping at my feet as I furiously pedaled until I got up enough speed and he tired of the chase.
One day the chain slipped the sprockets and I was immobilized right by the dog's driveway. Neither of us was prepared for that to happen.
My heart was in my mouth as he charged down the driveway toward the road, barking the whole way. Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks. I didn't speed off, and he didn't seem to have another strategy.
I walked my bike slowly down the road and he followed at a distance, growling but not nipping. After I got a little piece down the road, he seemed assured that he was the king of his turf and turned and trotted back to his driveway and disappeared from view.
After getting my chain back on the sprockets I pedaled off. From then on, I would get off the bike and walk it past his drive, and he never chased me again.'.
So, after years of 'chasing the car' of Plainfield's Democratic politics, Mayor Mapp finally 'caught the car' and was elected.
Two questions arise.
What will he do now that he has caught the car? Getting past tonight's appointment-stuffed Council meetings, we should begin to see some direction emerge as Mayor Mapp's team is finally assembled and folks come on line and take up their duties.
The second is whether those who watch -- and comment via the blogs -- will adopt a different tactic, realizing that postures and pronouncements of perpetual campaigning must be displaced by the nuts-and-bolts of governing, which is a very different thing.
Will the kibitzers be up to it?
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