The Elected Officials You Never Knew

Quick, name these people:

Ralph Jaffe
William Henry Campbell
Eddie Vendetti

Why, they are the current Governor, Comptroller and U.S. Senator from Maryland.

OK, now name these people:

Raj Narayanan
Robert Dyer
Mark Fennel
Brandon Rippeon
Robin Nixon Uncapher
Rob Vricella
Charles Kirchman
David Horner
Joseph Russek

Why, they are the current Montgomery County Council.

No, you say? Confused? Well, of course we’re right. We read it in the Washington Post.

Remember the embarrassing typo-filled response sent by the editors of the Washington Post’s online voters guide to MoCo candidates who provided info to them? Well, it turns out that was only a hint of things to come. The resulting Maryland voters guide lists every single candidate as an incumbent. Actually, that’s not so surprising given the attention that Post bosses pay to our state.

So here is Governor Jaffe. And Governor Cusick. And Governor O’Malley. One of the reasons why Maryland is such a great state is that we realize the job of Governor is so difficult that we had to split it three different ways.


And here is Comptroller Campbell. And Comptroller Girard. And Comptroller Madigan. And some guy named Comptroller Franchot. We collect a lot of taxes in Maryland, so we need four different Comptrollers to do it.


We are called the Free State, so that means we are free to have as many U.S. Senators as we want. So we picked eighteen of them. Why? Who cares – it’s more than any other state by a long shot.


And here are all those Montgomery County Council Members – all twenty-seven of them. Now we know why they don’t get along – there are too many of them. We need a smaller number to make it manageable. How about nine?



Maybe we are being too hard on the Post. We understand that because they favor fiscal conservatism, they are merely trying to save us money. Their proposal is obviously that anyone who runs for office wins. No election is necessary. After all, we already had one on May 4.


Subscription, anyone?