A Recall Election? Been There, Won That at Age 18

Michael Moore -- Long before I was making movies or writing books or going after elected officials, I was an elected official. In fact, I held the record as the youngest officeholder in the country. Just months after the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed, I was elected, at the age of 18, to a seat on the Board of Education in the school district where I lived in Michigan. I was still a senior in high school, and the idea of becoming the boss of the high school principal was just too good to pass up.

The day after my election, the assistant principal changed my name from "Hey, you!" to "Mr. Moore," and suddenly I realized I was in a place where maybe I could do some good.

Within nine months, the principal and assistant principal had handed in their resignations. As a school board member, I pushed for student rights, funding arts and music over sports and making sure that the board was beholden to the parents and students and not the business community. This did not endear me to the Chamber of Commerce. When the board tried to hand out no-bid contracts, I went to the state attorney general. When it tried to hold secret meetings, I called the prosecutor. And, when I made a motion that a new elementary school in this all-white district be named after Martin Luther King Jr., the Republicans in town had seen enough and took out recall petitions to have me removed.

The Darrell Issas of my town had the money to gather the signatures on the petitions and stage an aggressive campaign against me. I was making around $3 an hour and had nothing in the bank to fight back. As the recall day approached, I was filled with despair, much as I'm sure Davis is right now. I mean, who wants the entire public to go to the polls to answer the question, "Should we run this bozo out of town on a rail, yes or no?"

Of course, the difference between Davis and me is that I had not spent my term calling myself a Democrat but acting like a Republican. So when the recall happened, I had a lot of support.

Two professors from Manchester College in Indiana did a study of the 1994 congressional elections to figure out how the Newt Gingrich Revolution happened. What they discovered was that those Democrats who tried to modify their message to sound more middle of the road, who tried to make themselves bland because they thought this would make them more attractive — they were the Democrats who lost. Those who portrayed themselves as unapologetically liberal men and women of conscience were the ones who, in fact, got elected and reelected.

This is what Davis must do in the next few days. He has to give the dispossessed and disenfranchised — that vast pool of nonvoters — a reason to vote.