Today, the Chronicle ran the inevitable fluff piece on the write-in Congressional campaign of doctor-councilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. This snippet caught our eye:
Sekula-Gibbs said from the start that she would play by the party’s rules, formal and informal, as she sought a place on the ballot and, when courts ruled against that, the party’s blessing as a write-in.
She has little to lose politically because she doesn’t have to resign from the Houston City Council to run and is term-limited after next year anyway. Even if she falls short in the write-in effort against Democrat Nick Lampson, she has a chance to prove her political chops and emerge as the front-runner for the GOP nomination to reclaim the district for the party in 2008.
She doesn’t have to resign, but given the fact that many people in Congressional District 22 do not know the Houston councilmember, she could certainly have resigned her Council seat to show she was serious about introducing herself to the people of the Congressional District and trying to make a real race of it (not to mention to show she was serious about not shirking her responsibilities as an elected member of City Council while busily campaigning for another office).
It’s clear that the doctor-councilwoman intends this write-in candidacy to give her a leg up for 2008, with the grassroots and party elites. Still, it would be nice if just one journalist in this town would get doctor-councilwoman Sekula-Gibbs to answer the question of why she’s not resigning her Council seat, for the record. Our local journalists sometimes seem much too “nice” to ask hard questions, but this is a reasonably straightforward question that deserves an answer (as we pointed out twice in this post from nearly two weeks ago).
