The new mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan, is a man of the people, ready to listen to their every concern, but only until 6pm. Then he has to do his homework.
Sessions, who is too young to drink in his own town, won by just two votes after a recount. By 670 votes to 668, he beat the sitting mayor, who is 51 and had all the advantages of incumbency. And he won despite the fact that his name was not even on the ballot.
He was too young to stand by the spring deadline for registration, so after he turned 18 he entered as a write-in candidate -- meaning voters had to remember his name and add it to the ballot by hand in order to support him. The circumstances make his triumph all the more likely to be a model for future insurgent candidates.
PHOTO: AP
He started by winning the support of a powerful interest group, the Hillsdale firefighters' union, who had fallen out with the town council. The union has a membership of three, but in post-Sept. 11 US it wields symbolic clout. Before endorsing Sessions, its president, Kevin Pauken, called his teachers to check on his credentials.
"The guys were a little leery at first because of his age, but he really impressed us with his openness and his energy," Pauken told the Detroit News.
To help get his name known, Sessions raised US$700 selling toffee apples over the summer and spent it on posters and placards which were sprinkled around Hillsdale's lawns by election day. His month-long campaign involved going door to door, explaining his vision of the town's future in the kitchens of his initially sceptical neighbors.
"They'd look at me, and say `How old are you again? How much experience do you have?' And I say `I'm still in high school,'" he recalled.
He promised Hillsdale's voters he would revitalize the local economy and made his youthful energy his selling point.
"I was optimistic the whole time," he explained. At one point, five days before election day, that enthusiasm threatened to get the better of him. He spent so long out on the streets knocking on the doors, ignoring his mother's pleas for him to wear a coat, that he ended up in a hospital emergency room with bronchitis.
But by then his momentum had become unstoppable.
Sessions insists that his high school obligations will not get in the way of his mayoral duties, saying the US$3,000-a-year job is part-time.
"From 7:50am to 2:30pm, I'll be a student. From 3 to 6, I'll be the mayor of Hillsdale, working on mayor stuff," he said.
To help him do the "mayor stuff," he is assembling a transition team of trusted advisors, who will help him deal with the town council and the town manager, who run the town between them.
The ousted mayor, Douglas Ingles, conceded defeat graciously and prepared to return to running his business, a roller-skating rink.
"This is a very exciting time for our community. We need to find ways to generate enthusiasm, and I am 100 percent supportive of any change that makes that happen," he said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS