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The Yankton Press & Dakotan covers the city recall election results that replaced Mayor Curt Bernard and Councilman Dan Rupiper with design engineer David Carda and attorney David Knoff (cue the music, kids!).
Evidently ex-Councilamn Rupiper is having a little difficulty with reality:
"It's very difficult to get the message out in a short period of time," he said. "This was not an election driven by issues. If you really analyze it, it's everything centered around 'recall' and what the recall meant. To counter that is extremely difficult. We weren't able to do it" [quoted by Nathan Johnson, "Carda, Knoff Prevail," Yankton Press & Dakotan, 2007.12.19].
"...[D]ifficult to get the message out..."? Um, back in October, Ben Hanten and the original New Yankton group were able to get their message out in two weeks. I suppose if you're busy hunkering down in your office with your lawyers trying to come up with legalisms to stop the democratic process instead of accepting the challenge and knocking on doors for a few weeks, then yes, it might be difficult to get your message out. It doesn't help when your only major web presence is an anonymous cast of cryptic characters veering erratically from occasionally reasonable policy statements to Christmas stories and cries of the death of democracy on a mostly unnavigable website.
Local democracy isn't that hard, kids. Take the fight to the streets: knock on doors, talk to people, back it up with a decent website -- presto! message delivered. The recall organizers got it; Bernard and Rupiper didn't.
Negative politics still works faster than positive politics. It sounds like the voters probably made the right decision by taking back their community from perceived stronghold leadership, but when strong allegations are made by loud voices, it is very difficult for the target to remove the target. Time will tell if voters made the right decision. Remember the saying, "Be careful what you wish for".
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