I was just settling down to read the local rag before watching The Chase and there was a bit of a kerfuffle on my twitter timeline. A Liberal Democrat candidate for the PCC in Bedfordshire has retweeted a tweet saying that someone was voting for her but that was not an endorsement of the Liberal Democrats as a party. You can see the tweet below:
Innocent RT or something more…?
Some people seemed up in arms as I watched the debate intensify and I just don’t see what the issue is. Are we all getting our backs up about stupid things these days? The fact of the matter is we politicos are often blinded by the party that we belong to and we would vote a moron with the right color rosette on. The thing is for those people who aren’t politicos they can vote for one of two reasons – a party or a personality. Did George Galloway win his spot back in the House of Commons because the people of Bradford truly believed in the Respect Party or did they just like him? They just liked him.
If Linda (or any other Lib Dem PCC) is going to win tomorrow then they will do so thanks to their personality as well as their party. They will need votes from people who ideologically might not be liberals but believe that their candidate has to say. This person believes that despite Linda’s political affiliations that she is a very credible candidate and isn’t that a good thing? People are seeing beyond the color of a rosette and instead of blindly voting have looked into the candidates and decided who to vote for based not only on that rosette but on the person wearing it. Isn’t that what we are always imploring people to do? Actually look at personalities and policies and not color of rosettes?
We really should chill out on this. There is nothing to see here. Linda is getting a vote from someone who doesn’t particularly like the Lib Dems. This is a good thing and it certainly isn’t something to get worked up about. She was just showing that people are planning on voting for her despite not being fans of the Lib Dems. In the real world (and not in ideologically cloud cuckoo land) people get votes from people who both dislike them but like the party they represent but also who like them as a person but dislike the party they represent.
I just don’t see what all the fuss is about and because of the noise surrounding it I have spent quarter of an hour blogging about it. Sometimes guys we need to just chill the fuck out and not jump on people for something they didn’t even say.
