Blue America Welcomes Gordon Smith-- From North Carolina (Not Oregon)

A couple weeks ago western North Carolina activist and blogger Gordon Smith of Scrutiny Hooligans penned an expose about what went wrong with the highest ranking local Democratic elected official in his area, Blue Dog Congressman Health Shuler. Two weeks later-- yesterday, to be precise, Gordon officially announced his own campaign for city council in the biggest city in Shuler's district, Asheville (population 90,000/greater metro area is 370,000). Today we've asked Gordon to join us at Firedoglake to talk about his grassroots efforts in the district and about transitioning from blogger/activist to actually running for office.

He's 38, married to Rachel with whom he has two dogs, and makes a living as a child and family therapist. After he graduated from college he served in Belfast for two years with the Brethren Volunteer Service doing community reconciliation work with Protestants and Catholics. He started blogging in 2004 at DFA and co-founded Scrutiny Hooligans which evolved into a political blog and then BlogAshville. As the 2006 congressional race approached the Scrutiny Hooligans bloggers realized there wasn't anyone covering incumbent Republican Charles Taylor's corrupt dealings-- so they got serious and very busy and helped replace Taylor with Shuler. He's proud of helped get rid of Taylor even if he and his colleagues are having serious buyers' remorse over the replacement.

"I discovered that the more local I blogged and the smaller my focus got, the more traffic we got. So we started covering county and city affairs in Asheville and Buncombe County and suddenly we were a part of a regular go-to media for news in this area... Scrutiny Hooligans has become a destination for folks trying to catch up on what's going on locally."

When I asked him what made him decide to jump from blogging to running for office there were many factors he talked about but one of the most important is that "Asheville is facing an enormous budget deficit for a city of our size. And here in North Carolina we have what's called 'home rule,' which means that if you don't balance your budget, the state will come in and take over your city. When the budget deficits were announced the first things that came out of the city managers mouth was about cutting the things that make our community most resilient through recessions. He was talking about cutting money that was going to go towards an Affordable Housing Trust Fund for the construction of affordable housing, and cutting money for alternative transportation-- for buses, for bike lanes, for greenways... All the stuff that make this city more affordable, more liveable, more sustainable were the first things that were on the chopping block. So I'm running, first and foremost to be able to protect those priorities."

You'll get a good idea about the issues facing the voters in Asheville and what kinds of priorities Gordon is addressing at his campaign website, which is also someplace where you can donate or volunteer. The housing crisis in Asheville, though, was another important factor that spurred Gordon into deciding to run for city council.

We have one of the highest costs of living in the state of North Carolina and one of the lowest median incomes. What that means is that people have a hard time finding a place to live. This has been a very attractive vacation destination for a long time; we have a lot of people who have second homes here and that's really driven up property values in ways that no one has ever expected. There are a lot of people in this town who are working two and three jobs and who are having to either live substandard, share places, or live with family because they just can't afford a place to live. That's why it's so important to maintain the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which gives loans and helps developers who are creating affordable housing to get lines of credit.

Join us over at Firedoglake today at 2pm (EST) and meet Gordon to learn more about his campaign and about building progressive infrastructure through blogging.