Posted on 11/02/2006 9:25:10 AM PST by lowbridge
The school board race in Rockingham County, N.C., has produced imagery including, from left, Pink Floyd, “Star Wars,” and the Wild West.
The election season is getting punchier in places far from the national political spotlight — even in Eden, N.C., where 16 candidates are slugging it out for the five available seats on the Rockingham County School Board.
One of them produced a television advertisement suggesting that the school system turned children into automatons. It is shot against a backdrop of a Pink Floyd video showing children coursing through an assembly line to the lyrics: “We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control.”
Another candidate shows himself brandishing a light saber as a “Star Wars” Death Star blows up a little red schoolhouse. The message: the federal government, a “cosmic bully,” meddles too much in education.
The advertisement of a third contender, riffing on a “new sheriff in town” theme, shows a sheriff being killed in “The Terror of Tiny Town,” the 1938 all-dwarf musical Western.
Not every local race is quite as entertaining, but the Rockingham County election shows how national issues like education, the economy, crime and ethics have been localized.
And the effort invested in contests for school board, city council, sheriff and state legislatures is emblematic of how much stock voters, interest groups and political parties are placing on local elections.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Christopher Knight uses YouTube in campaign for school board (Star Wars theme video)
Christopher Knight uses YouTube in campaign for school board (Commmercial #2)
Christopher Knight uses YouTube in campaign for school board, Rockingham County, NC (Commmercial #3)
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Would you please send out the pings? Thanks.
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