Fark's Drew Curtis Running For Governor Of Kentucky

from the this-is-great dept

If you read Techdirt, hopefully you're also familiar with Fark, the super popular news aggregator that was sort of Digg before Digg, Reddit before Reddit and Hackernews before Hackernews -- but still unique in its own way. It's main claim to fame is the snarky one-line summaries of the various stories that it posts, and it's all around awesome. It's run by a guy named Drew Curtis, who is also pretty awesome, and who has long been engaged on various important issues related to the future of the internet and keeping it viable. Either way, in a bit of a surprise announcement Friday afternoon, he's announced that he's running for governor of Kentucky and his campaign website is like none you've ever seen before. It's not often that a political campaign kicks off with a Douglas Adams quote:

“It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.” – Douglas Adams

But Curtis is serious -- and mainly serious about having actual human beings, rather than politicians, be elected to key positions to bring about real change:

We have a theory that we’re about to see a huge change in how elections and politics work. Across the country, we have seen regular citizens stepping up and challenging the status quo built by political parties and career politicians. They have been getting closer and closer to victory and, here in Kentucky, we believe we have a chance to win and break the political party stronghold for good. We are not politicians. We are Citizen Candidates. Citizen Candidates evaluate ideas on merit, not on outside influence, campaign contribution sources, or party ideology. They believe a good idea is a good idea, no matter which political party supports it. Citizen Candidates are regular people with common sense. They are capable leaders who would be fantastic elected officials - if they chose to run.
Most don’t. And we can’t blame them.

The campaign talks about others, like Tim Wu and Zephyr Teachout, who basically came out of nowhere to have a major impact on the governor's race in NY.

While it's all too easy to be cynical about politicians and lobbyists and special interests, it's encouraging to see more people pushing back against those things, and actually looking to make a real difference. Whether or not this effort succeeds, we need more efforts like this, and I'm excited to see Curtis take a shot.

Filed Under: citizen candidates, drew curtis, governor, kentucky, politics
Companies: fark