Outsider. He's wearing a sun hat with a Xeroxed, scissor-cut campaign button pinned on the front, spraying weed killer in his all-weed yard. He sets the poison down, goes inside, throws a ball for his third and newest cat, a Siamese-looking adoptee who's not in the mood to chase, but rather to glare, but who nonetheless does not dampen the droll spirit of 49-year-old Stan Vaughan. Vaughan is about to go door-to-door to distribute campaign material in his second bid to unseat 22-year incumbent Assemblyman Morse Arberry—an unlikely prospect, but Vaughan seems peculiarly inured to that unlikelihood, as he is to the slapdash look of his campaign button and the pungent aroma of a house run by cats. He is eager to hit the trail. It's 105 degrees outside, and he has frozen a bottle of water for himself and packed a shoulder bag full of fliers, and he is eager.
In many ways, he's emblematic of everything that's not working in our political system. Stan Vaughan is intelligent enough—he's some kind of chess whiz who reads Marcus Aurelius for fun. He has the will. He has the time, despite working full-time as a business broker. But you have to wonder whether he really gets the political system—or just thinks he can change it from the outside.
Out on the trail: There's this couple walking their mutt in a middle-class neighborhood when the stranger in a sunhat crosses the street, charging toward them. Already something's wrong—people don't approach strangers in the suburbs, they nod or wave and stay on their side of the street.
"I'm Stan Vaughan, and I'm trying to knock out the 22-year incumbent. I'm out meeting people and giving out information," he says as he hands them a campaign flier. "I'm trying to get 'The Moose' Arberry out. I'd appreciate your vote."
"Okay," the man says, his posture stiff and defensive. The woman offers a fake smile. The dog pulls at the leash.
"Thank you, have a good afternoon," the candidate concludes.
And that's the state of political dialogue today. (Later Vaughan confesss, "I'm not a social person. My idea of a good night is reading a couple of books ... I really had to work on being social, but I'm getting better.")
Vaughan and the couple who had no idea who their state representative was—they seem, like a lot of us, to have stopped getting politics a long time ago. Stopped wanting to get it. After all, it appears to be a sleazy, semi-secretive system that requires questionable ethics, shrewd deal-making skills and a disingenuous public persona. So people either want to ignore it, as in the case of the dog-walkers, or imagine that with a little idealism they can change it, as in the case of the Vaughans, the under dogs, the long shots.
And although they have very little chance of winning, a host of outsiders turn up every election season and sink a lot of time and money into running. Some are further off the mark than others—there are long-shot candidates with a viable chance, if not this time then maybe if they ran again, because they are plugged in to the insiders' network, such as Democratic candidate for Congress Jack Carter. And then there are lone wolfs who, albeit with some sense of irony, are too distant from the system we loathe for us to elect.
"I tend to think that these people help the process even if they really have no chance to win," says David Damore, UNLV political science professor.
Stan Vaughan has run against the Morse "the Moose" Arberry before, outspent him about 20 to 1, he says, and got only 6 percent of the vote. This year he switched from Independent to Democrat, Arberry's party, to bring some backing to his fight, and the party of a large majority of his district. He's a pro-lifer who supports starting a state lottery to pay for education and toughening immigration laws, but nothing he does gets much attention. He's got very few deep-pocketed supporters—he digs into his own pockets to fund most of his campaign. He's a white guy in a district that's largely minority. He's never held public office. He visited the Legislature exactly once.
"In a state like Nevada with a strong history of the citizen (as opposed to professional) politician," Damore says, "these people demonstrate that the process is open to anyone, and you do not have to be well-connected to get on the ballot ...
"The downside for most of these candidates is that they do not have the resources to get their message out, and because they are not competitive, the media tends to ignore them, creating a real catch-22."
The media is largely ignoring Stan Vaughan despite his incessant stream of e-mails to political reporters, offering play-by-play accounts of his campaign travails ("the candidate, wearing tennis shoes, slipped and slid down a hill experiencing several cuts and bruises") and strategy:
"As most know at filing deadline back in May, I made offer to also distribute literature for any and all Democrats while we do our canvassing. Yesterday [I] am pleased to say, my friend Linda Howard now has campaign literature and has accepted that previous offer of helping any and all Democrats and thus we began also distributing Howard for Public Administrator literature as we began our second tour canvassing the district ... As I said back in May, one of my objectives is trying to create a fully informed electorate who know about all the candidates to greatest extent."
There's a steep campaign goal: to create a fully informed electorate.
His motivation for running, even as an outsider—"I'm an unknown, nobody knows me"—is born in his idealism and dislike of the special-interest dependent system the way he sees it:
"My blog," he writes on his website, speaking about his campaign philosophy generally, "is not for those gutless politicians who ... have spent their political careers using money from the likes of special interests to stop representing ordinary people ... those whose only convictions seem to be re-elections, rather than actually standing up for Nevada's middle class."
There it is: The outsider wants to stand up for the rest of the political outsiders. Without becoming an insider.
On this hot afternoon, the candidate is marching—not strolling, but something just shy of a jog—across lawns and atop rock landscaping and up to front doors to tuck his fliers, along with Democrat gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibson's, under doormats and behind screen doors. He doesn't actually knock on the doors—not yet, he says, maybe later in Round 2 of his visits. He's just delivering fliers. He's basically operating in a void. But he has lost 20 pounds since he began.
His goal: 600 houses this afternoon. Every house in the sprawling North Las Vegas district eventually. Three times each before the fall election.
One has to wonder what his opponent, Arberry, is doing this hot evening, but Arberry didn't return phone calls. He doesn't need to. He knows his base so well, he's presumably so confident in the machine he's used to get into office for an entire lifetime, how could be possibly benefit from discussing Stan Vaughan? Why bother?