As many of you have seen, election season is in full swing in New York City.
As I drank my coffee and looked for topics to cover, Mayoral candidate Bill Thompson’s concession speech was aired and it got me thinking.
How dumb is it to announce that a candidate is conceding when they know they’ve lost?
Thompson, who promised that he would not concede until all of the votes were counted, announced that he would pull out and back the now Democratic candidate Bill deBlasio. The problem with the idea of Thompson conceding though, is the fact that he wasn’t even close to deBlasio’s vote count.
According to the New York Times, deBlasio had 40.3% of the votes in the primary and Thompson only had 26.2. Obviously Thompson has lost, it’s not conceding when you’ve lost.
Conceding would infer that Thompson was yielding or surrendering to deBlasio, but he isn’t. He lost. I don’t know how else to phrase it.
The reason I offer this opinion, is because the same thing happens in national elections. Hillary did it, Santorum did it, every loser candidate does it. It may seem that there is dignity in offering an acceptance of your loss, but there’s no dignity left in politics. So I implore you to listen to what your candidates are saying, what they are actually doing as their campaigns rev up and die down, because so many of the formalities are simply redundant and pointless.
As is a normality on my Facebook page, I’ll leave you with this:
THE FREELANCE RIDER 