“Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.” – Ambrose Bierce

It seems that 2008 is the Year of the Young Politician in Fairbanks.  First we had Schaeffer Cox, a 24-year-old construction worker, challenging incumbent Mike Kelly in the Republican primary for House District 7.  In six days, Ron Warner II, a 19-year-old laborer, will square off against Bernard Gatewood and David Lerman for Fairbanks City Council Seat C.

Schaeffer Cox, former House District 7 candidate

While young candidates aren’t a new phenomenon, what probably surprised many is the impact they are having.  Though Cox failed to unseat Kelly’s reelection bid, he garnered 37% of the vote, coming within about 400 votes of victory.  The robust support Cox had in the primary is all the more surprising when coupled with the facts that not only did he raise nearly as much money as Kelly in his primary bid, he had about twice as many donors as Kelly.

The news about young local politicians isn’t all good.  The first worry people likely have about young people running for office is a lack of experience.  While the benefits of political experience are sometimes debatable, it is difficult to argue that Schaeffer Cox’s position on how to manage greenhouse gas emissions wouldn’t be helped by more thorough study of the issue: “Allow people to manage our forests, utilize our timber resources and prevent the build up, burn out cycle of forest fires that dump hundreds of years worth of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a week.” (Source: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner)

While it’s true that wildfires are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions in Alaska and one that frequently gets us in trouble with the EPA, Cox’s answer is not only something of a dodge of the greater issue of man-made greenhouse emissions but also betrays a lack of understanding of fairly basic forestry.  Alaskan wildfires tend to burn almost exclusively in black spruce forests, and timber companies have no interest in harvesting black spruce.  Additionally, wildfires are actually very necessary to the life cycle of the black spruce forests, which is why the Forest Service tends to let them burn unless the fires threaten lives or property.

Ron Warner II, the 19-year-old running for City Council, is running a very low-profile campaign, so there aren’t many of his position papers making the rounds.  I did, however, come across a Youtube video in which he states that “Four out of five Supreme Court Justices do not believe that citizens have a right- an individual right to bear arms,” overlooking the fact that there are in fact nine justices on the Supreme Court, so you would have to pick exactly the right five for Warner’s statement to be true.

None of this is to say that these young men are unfit for office, or that they would necessarily be benefited by the experience of their opponents.  Many local candidates could be generously described as “colorful”, so it’s not fair to act as though young politicians are out of their depth in the candidate pool.  Rather, what I hope for, as I expect do many others, is that someday a candidate will arrive in whom youth does not come at the expense of knowledge about the issues, or in whom experience does not come at the expense of an open mind.