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The year 2000 marked the real beginning of my civic awakening. It started upside-down, with national politics; but perhaps that is the way it is for many of us. I had been so ambivalent during the 1996 presidential election that I can honestly tell you that I do not remember for whom I voted. It was either President Bill Clinton or former Senator Bob Dole. I can tell you that much. It was in Berrien Township, Michigan, where I lived as a grad student. I don't know what I did with regard to the 1998 midterms. I was back in Chattanooga then.

Sometime late in 1999, I got bitten by the politics bug, and the itch has yet to subside. In 2000, I started paying attention to local and state elections for the first time. I went to candidate forums. It was at one of these, at Alexian Village on Signal Mountain, that I heard several candidates vying for retiring Rep. Bill McAfee's seat. Among these was a social conservative named Chris Clem. I found his remarks to be so off-putting that I was determined to vote against him at every opportunity. I voted for one of his GOP primary opponents, and then for Stuart James in the general. Clem won, obviously.

In 2002, the wife and I were renting a house in the Riverview precinct of North Chattanooga. When we moved there, I had taken note that the area was in the same 27th House district that I had occupied on Signal. When it came time, I walked the surrounding neighborhoods asking for signatures to put me on the ballot. I was determined to give voters an alternative to Clem. During the process, however, I learned that the Riverview precinct had recently been redistricted into the 28th, represented by Tommie Brown. The news was disappointing, because I wanted to give Clem as much of a challenge as I could muster. I decided to keep going, though, just to learn the system in case I ever wanted to mount a serious campaign. However, to complicate matters further, the wife and I found a house in Brainerd that met our needs (we had been looking in North Chatt), and we moved to yet a different district that summer.

The election commission would not take me off the November 2002 ballot in the 28th, even though I had moved out of the district. The reason given was that the deadline for withdrawing from the race had passed. It would seem that the move to the 30th would have disqualified me immediately, and there would have been no need to withdraw. For whatever reason, that argument didn't go very far with them, so some 3% of voters in the 28th cast ballots for someone (me) who was not eligible to serve.

(Readers should note that I have since corresponded with Chris, and though he and I still disagree on a number of things philosophically, I hold him in much higher regard than a less mature version of me did.)