About Me

Hello again. I’d like to tell you a little about myself.

Firstly, I am a non-partisan. I’ve been a no party preference voter for over 40 years.

This puts me in the largest party affiliation group in the country at about 40%. There’s about 40% of us who are not affiliated with either of the major parties or the minor parties.

Interestingly, despite that, out of 435 members in the house, there’s only one, as of a few days ago, who is not affiliated with one of the two major parties. Well, the system is structured that way, and I’ll elaborate on that later in the campaign, but if things were a little different, you might expect to have a few more – any – nonpartisan voices in Congress, and I think it could improve things.

That was my main motivation for running because I’ve seen the partisan divide get wider and wider and worse and worse over the last decades.

There are still plenty of people on either side who are quite convinced that the greater danger facing the country is the other party and that they must be stopped at all costs. I think the partisan divide itself is the bigger problem. So that’s what I’m aiming to bridge and try to calm, and I bring that sensibility and that voice to Congress.

Professionally, I am a software architect and engineer, so I have those sensibilities.

An engineering sensibility is basically wanting it to work. That’s what engineers care about. They want it to work. They don’t care so much about what solution and is it their solution and who gets the credit. That’s secondary if it matters at all.

Engineers also care about cost. That’s a fundamental. It was Wellington in the 1800s paraphrased saying that engineering is doing for one dollar what any damn fool can do for two. Because in the end, cost really does matter. You can’t have everything, and if you do this, you can’t do that and so on.

Budgets exist in the real world. In government there’s a certain lack of that, and this is one of the problems that they don’t want to address because everybody wants something, and it just piles on. At some point, you have to take costs seriously. So engineering sensibility brings that.

The architect sensibility is about how all the pieces come together to form a coherent whole. And if you don’t have a good architecture, you may have good parts, but the whole is not going to be very good. And that’s something I’ve been doing now for a couple decades and very successfully.

Architecture also unavoidably involves multiple stakeholders who have different ideas and biases and goals and priorities, and so you have to work with a lot of different people and sort things out. So I have a lot of experience in that area as well.

Lastly, but not least, I am good at math. I’m a math guy. You can read about that on my site, and that’s important because a lot of government activities and laws are unavoidably mathematical.

There’s aspects where the math is fundamental and there’s a lot of trickery. And I, for one, am not easily fooled when it comes to mathematical trickery. So I think that’s a strength. I hope you’ll appreciate that.

What I bring to the game here in terms of mindset and temperament is something that our district and the country could use and that you’ll support me in part because of that.

Please share this campaign as I asked you before. I hope I’m gaining some confidence on your part, and I thank you again for your time.