Power of the Purse

After work today I went to a United Way fundraiser called the "Power of the Purse" which invited women to come and meet and greet and bid on jewellry. There had to be a couple of hundred women there. So I mixed around and met and greeted. I saw Judge Hawkins there. One of my girlfriends has an in-law who is a judge and she says that elected judges have to stay in the public eye even after they are elected so that they can stay elected. Then I went on to the Tallahasse Bar Association's judicial forum, which was challenging. There were probably well over one hundred people there, all five of the County Judges were there, and several other judges, including a federal court judge, an appellate court judge, and some circuit judges and administrative law judges. The room was predominently Newton supporters, with a few, but enthusiastic, Flury supporters. None of the questions submitted by my friends were accepted. There was one soft ball question each for Newton and Flury. The first time I got up to speak, the Tallahassee Democrat reporter took so many flash pictures I thought I was going blind. They had this complicated system for determining who went first, I spoke first, and then answered the first question first, and then we cycled so much I frankly had trouble keeping up with who was next. The questions were not deeply taxing, in some ways, but the first question was whether the case work I had done would cause me to be biased on the bench. Which I thought was sort of a retarded question, because any lawyer of any talent knows that lawyers get ahead by knowing both sides of a case. There was a question about our committee work and pro bono work, a question about what work we had done in county court, and I forget the other two. In closing, we were asked to cover anything we felt that had not been adequately covered previously. So I talked about the opportunity to run, and the importance of applying for open judgeships and running, and how my only sadness was that there were not more people running.