Jay Kuten PHOTO/FILE
Every election is important in its own way ...
Ours - for district council or Horizons or the district health board - may pale in consequence to the messy one in the United States, but there are parallels and lessons to be learned.
Donald Trump has mastered the art of television with its bumper-sticker thinking; Hillary Clinton has mastered policy but fails to connect enough with voters.
Trump, though manifestly unqualified on the basis of temperament and bigotry, is succeeding through the darker arts of populism. He describes America as a dystopia, in economic and social decline, and promises his supporters that he alone can fix things.
"If I am president," he declares, "all these problems will go away."
Populist style has been practiced at least since Machiavelli. Tell the people how badly things are going - because of corrupt or incompetent elitist leaders - then declare that deliverance is at hand. All people need do is follow.
Standing at a distance we can all see through the braggadocio of a Donald Trump but up close its another matter.
Whanganui had its own experience of a populist mayor who made promises to save us, promises to save on rates, promises to "put the city on the map", promises to govern efficiently through a party structure. He also made attacking the motives of others and the state of the city his signature style.
Those tactics needlessly deepened divisions in this community, and we've been slowly recovering from that.
As one alternative, I've often called for business people either on council or in an advisory capacity. We need ways to stimulate and grow our economy, and business people offer an important slant and their contacts with others in the rest of the country could be of exceptional added value.
But business success is no guarantee of governance success. The presidency of George W Bush, a Harvard MBA, with vice-president Dick Cheney a corporate chief executive, is a case in point. With the Iraq debacle and stewardship of the near economic meltdown, their failures are legendary.
Ultimately the purpose of business is generation of profit. The bottom line approach is extremely useful in short-term thinking for the success or failure of a company, but may well be a short-sightedness when what counts is the long view of the future of a city.
That long view must take account of the complexities of human potential, especially if what's involved is a diverse population, one sometimes with competing interests.
Ours is such a diverse population - we're young, old, rich, poor, Maori, pakeha, artists and tradesmen. And the sources of potential growth are varied from small manufacture, farming, medical care, the several arts, tourism and technology, to cite but a few.
As this election campaign has progressed I've become more sceptical about the voting bloc called "The Team". Promising jobs, saving us money, increasing our population by 50 per cent sound attractive but have yet to be more than soundbites. What most concerns me is a campaign tone of "take no prisoners".
The model of a voting bloc has been tried here before and failed spectacularly. In large measure that failure was occasioned by the divisiveness both of campaign and governance.
Fearmongering with the promise of a quick fix for long-standing problems is the earmark of populist regimes, with their authoritarian top-down resolution. The fear doesn't vanish after election and discourages the average citizen from the active participation that's needed to do the real work.
It would be folly not to recognise the settlement of the Treaty claims as an engine of economic opportunity, and any new council worthy of our vote will need to continue the efforts at inclusiveness of Maori undertaken by the present council.
It's another important area where what is needed from any councillor we elect is the ability to bridge divides, not create them; the ability to understand and respect views different from their own.
To be for Whanganui, you need to be inclusive of its many factions. We cannot afford an approach I'd have to call "against".
*Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.