Something real, for a change

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/cityplus/story.html?id=3f46b859-6a07-4e41-bf18-9793c64b857b

Yes, I already support Don Iveson. Yes, this post is from the get-go biased in favour of a particular candidate.
Please read the article anyway.
Why, you may ask? Because Don has a point (a number of good points, actually), and represents a real possibility.
Politics doesn't have to be the same game year after year. It has been for a long time, I know. The same middle-aged, middle-class men and women (mostly men) running for the same offices on the same "ideas" (I say "ideas" because, as often as not, those "ideas" are actually 10-15 word sentence fragments that don't actually communicate anything of substance, relying on populism and style to get the prize) and get to keep their seats for as long as they want them because the same old wisdom says that incumbents are untouchable.

Don isn't that. His platform (http://www.doniveson.ca) includes real, complete sentences and cogent ideas; things that, in my mind at least, have sadly become a novelty in political forums. He is a candidate of substance who has been working extremely hard since May to talk to as many of his constituents as he can; not just to shake their hands and kiss their babies, but to speak with them and listen to them. Against conventional wisdom, against conventional odds, he has taken it upon himself to provide Ward 5 with a real alternative to the status quo.

And those same odds that are supposed to be stacked against Don are stacked against you, good people of the interweb. The same pundits who push the untouchability of incumbents and who accept that the crap we see in most campaign platforms is as much as the electorate both wants and deserves are people who say that the voice of young people don't need to be taken into account in civic politics. They say that you don't vote because civic politics don't matter to you. They say that since the antics of (civic) politicians don't matter to you, you don't need to matter to them.

Wouldn't it be something if we proved conventional wisdom wrong on both counts?

There is a choice to be made this election that could actually change the status quo. Don't let the opportunity you have on October 15 go to waste.