Wait! There's an election coming up?

The telephone call waiting for me on the answering machine was one of those political "robo-calls" — prerecorded messages from political candidates urging me to vote for them. The announcement pointed out that early voting starts tomorrow. I had hardly noticed.

How life has changed since I left journalism! Just as a parent's life revolves around a school calendar, an editor's life revolves around the political calendar. I used to make note not only of the big dates — the beginning and ending of the filing period and the primary and general election dates — but also the little-noticed but newsworthy dates, such as the campaign finance reporting deadlines. Those generated some of our best coverage. And although my life-long interest in politics has barely dimmed, my involvement in the process has fallen off sharply. For the first time in decades, I can't tell you who the candidates are for county commissioner, sheriff and state legislature. When I was with the newspaper, I would be shocked at the number of people who didn't read the paper and would wonder how they functioned, as nearly oblivious as they were, as voters in a democratic society. Unless you read the paper closely, and unless the newspaper takes seriously its obligation to present political news factually and objectively, it's difficult to know whom to vote for or even who's running, especially on the local level.

Before May 4, I'll have to educate myself on the candidates for office in the primary, and I may, for the first time in my life, vote "early." My new job involves a hurricane drill on primary election day, so I may be too busy to get to the polls. But I'm wondering whether the folks at state Emergency Management were making a political statement in scheduling a mock hurricane to strike the N.C. coast on primary day.