Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: Phyllis.



Today, Vote Phyllis is done. Okay, I wrote the closing lines on Monday night, but it was today I went through and polished up the last bits and trimmed out excess words and generally finished it.

I find it interesting that I finished Vote Phyllis the story on election day, while real Phyllis was making her bid for city council. Hopefully she will win because that seems sympathetically magical.

I didn't go out and vote for her because my cold is still rampaging. I probably wouldn't have actually voted for Phyllis anyway, truth be told. I have little to no idea what she stands for. Because I like to throw sand in the gears, I'd probably have voted for Lih Young.

Lih Young is a local character, like a cross between Ross Perot and Francis Dec. She'll run for pretty much anything, from City Council (as this year) to State Comptroller. Last time out she got 3.5 percent of the vote for City Council. She apparently got her Ph.D in economics from City University of New York, and she's functional enough to fill out all the elections paperwork properly, so they have to put her on the ballot, print her campaign statments in the papers, etc.

But she's also quite mad, complete with the recurring verbal tics that characterize Dec. Her big one is "official misconduct- government gang- fraud- crime- injustice networks."

In fact, here it is heading off her platform statement for this year's election from a local civic group's roundup of candidates:

I am running for Council to protect people, eliminate: "official misconduct- government gang- fraud- crime- injustice networks" operation, unjust practices, local- global; cruel tyranny, robbery machine, continuing, on-going, threat, coercion, victimization, deprivation; endless abuse, unlawful- immoral acts, influences; cause serious socio-economic-political problems. Urge people: to unite work on strategies, based on fairness, principles, function, cost- effectiveness; investigate cases, complaints; administrative, judicial; identified problems, official misconduct (opposite education, democracy, government missions); promote fair complaint-election processes, people inputs, debates; stop public resources for unjust schemes, projects, current Town Center Plan- biggest frauds in Rockville history, public resources $99 millions for private gain (officials, developers, lawyers, etc.), abuses (power, litigation, condemnation, misleading); Oppose city attorney, nonsense programs to benefit fraud- crime- networks operation. Oppose: increase year-length of term (mayor, council).

It's very amusing watching local press try to report on her. This piece is about as close as I've seen anyone come to just going, "you know, she's nuts." Usually, because she's jumped through all the same hoops the other candidates have, they fall all over themselves trying not to show bias, even though you can't really do a coherent interview with her. They tend toward just letting her speak for herself, in her entirety since there's no real way to edit her down to a point.

But, all in all, she'd be a much better President than Bush, and she's got my vote.