The new mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan, is a man of the people, ready to listen to their every concern, but only until 6pm. Then he has to do his homework.
Sessions, who is too young to drink in his own town, won by just two votes after a recount. By 670 votes to 668, he beat the sitting mayor, who is 51 and had all the advantages of incumbency. And he won despite the fact that his name was not even on the ballot.
He was too young to stand by the spring deadline for registration, so after he turned 18 he entered as a write-in candidate -- meaning voters had to remember his name and add it to the ballot by hand in order to support him. The circumstances make his triumph all the more likely to be a model for future insurgent candidates.
PHOTO: AP
He started by winning the support of a powerful interest group, the Hillsdale firefighters' union, who had fallen out with the town council. The union has a membership of three, but in post-Sept. 11 US it wields symbolic clout. Before endorsing Sessions, its president, Kevin Pauken, called his teachers to check on his credentials.
"The guys were a little leery at first because of his age, but he really impressed us with his openness and his energy," Pauken told the Detroit News.
To help get his name known, Sessions raised US$700 selling toffee apples over the summer and spent it on posters and placards which were sprinkled around Hillsdale's lawns by election day. His month-long campaign involved going door to door, explaining his vision of the town's future in the kitchens of his initially sceptical neighbors.
"They'd look at me, and say `How old are you again? How much experience do you have?' And I say `I'm still in high school,'" he recalled.
He promised Hillsdale's voters he would revitalize the local economy and made his youthful energy his selling point.
"I was optimistic the whole time," he explained. At one point, five days before election day, that enthusiasm threatened to get the better of him. He spent so long out on the streets knocking on the doors, ignoring his mother's pleas for him to wear a coat, that he ended up in a hospital emergency room with bronchitis.
But by then his momentum had become unstoppable.
Sessions insists that his high school obligations will not get in the way of his mayoral duties, saying the US$3,000-a-year job is part-time.
"From 7:50am to 2:30pm, I'll be a student. From 3 to 6, I'll be the mayor of Hillsdale, working on mayor stuff," he said.
To help him do the "mayor stuff," he is assembling a transition team of trusted advisors, who will help him deal with the town council and the town manager, who run the town between them.
The ousted mayor, Douglas Ingles, conceded defeat graciously and prepared to return to running his business, a roller-skating rink.
"This is a very exciting time for our community. We need to find ways to generate enthusiasm, and I am 100 percent supportive of any change that makes that happen," he said.
India yesterday summoned Canada’s high commissioner in India to “convey strong concern” over Sikh protesters in Canada and how they were allowed to breach the security of India’s diplomatic mission and consulates. Canadian media reported that hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the Indian consulate in Vancouver on Saturday over demands for an independent Sikh state, a simmering issue for decades that was triggered again in the past few weeks. Canada has the highest population of Sikhs outside their home state of Punjab in India. “It is expected that the Canadian government will take all steps which are required to ensure the
CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS: The US destroyer’s routine operations in the South China Sea would have ‘serious consequences,’ the defense ministry said China yesterday threatened “serious consequences” after the US Navy sailed a destroyer around the disputed Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島) in the South China Sea for the second day in a row, in a move Beijing claimed was a breach of its sovereignty and security. The warning came amid growing tensions between China and the US in the region, as Washington pushes back at Beijing’s growingly assertive posture in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway it claims virtually in its entirety. On Thursday, after the US sailed the USS Milius guided-missile destroyer near the Paracel Islands, China said its navy and
The US Department of Justice on Friday unveiled spying charges against a Russian who, under a Brazilian alias, studied at a Washington university and then tried to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The indictment of Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov said it would try to contest his extradition to Russia from Brazil, where he is jailed on identity fraud charges. Cherkasov, 39, was detained at the beginning of April last year by Dutch authorities for using fake identity papers. He arrived in the country as Viktor Muller Ferreira, a Brazilian, to take a position at the ICC as a junior analyst. The
The US military must be ready for possible confrontation with China, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Thursday, pushing the US Congress to approve the Pentagon’s proposed US$842 billion budget, which would modernize the force in Asia and around the world. “This is a strategy-driven budget — and one driven by the seriousness of our strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” Austin told the US House of Representations Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Pointing to increases in new technology, such as hypersonics, Austin said the budget proposes to spend more than US$9 billion, a 40 percent increase over last
RSS