Just a Newsletter

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Here it is 6:30 p.m., and I’m still in the office. One of the comments from last night was that the Senator needed to hire more staff, and I don’t disagree. Unfortunately, she can’t afford to pay anyone, and the state provides only me. We do have an intern, but her focus is on following the Senator to committee and learning about the legislative process.

The Senator has decided to miss tomorrow’s pro forma session and go home tonight rather than tomorrow afternoon, so I will be alone in the office for the part of tomorrow I will work before I head to Topeka, too. That’s when I will really get the work done, of course – when there’s nobody else in the office. With any luck, the phone will be quiet, too.

What kept me late tonight was the Senator’s newsletter. The Majority Leader’s office does have staff – enough staff to have a manager – and one of those minions, Stefanie Grave, produces a generic newsletter each Thursday that we look through and modify a little here and a little there to make it our newsletter. I, of course, also read it looking for typos and style errors. Being a nitpicker does take time.

Newsletters are one of those things that legislators are expected to produce, but which really gain the legislator little credit. No one values it but everyone notices if it doesn’t appear. Much of politics is like that. People want their legislators to continually communicate with them, then they complain because they get too many e-mails or such like from them. Finding the balance between keeping the public informed and letting the public be as uninformed as they'd like is tricky.

I was very proud of the nearly weekly newsletters produced by the Majority Leader’s staff and tweaked by me in the first two years of my time with Senator Betts. But I was recently told that many people objected to getting so many and tossed them aside without reading them. Talk about throwing a wet blanket!

On the other hand, I don’t have to feel guilty any more that I wasn’t able to keep up the same pace in the second two years I sat in that tiny little office. Perhaps the occasional newsletters we sent out those years had more impact than the weekly ones. I guess I’ll never know for sure.

Well, I’ve maundered along long enough. Tomorrow I’ll be able to write in the morning, so it may be worth reading.
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