New At YDN

In my first New Haven-centric column, I endorse a candidate for alderman:

I have no idea whether Nick Shalek is up to the tasks of the office he seeks...but I do know that he is neither sclerotically wedded to a governing ideology with a proven record of failure, nor happily and consensually beholden to the intractably corrupt central committees of special-interest lobbies who do not speak for the rank-and-file of their own membership, let alone the broader community. On that basis alone, he is the best of the field of candidates for Ward 1 alderman.

There is a gruesome irony in the fact that a colony founded to escape the wanton Puritanism-lite of Massachusetts should have evolved into a rotten borough on a par with the worst excesses of Hanoverian England. In the interest of slowing, and perhaps even halting the growth of machine politics, this column officially throws its support to the candidacy of Nick Shalek, and urges its vast readership to do likewise.