Lots of times in my life I’ve momentarily regretted opening my big mouth, but usually in the long run I’d be glad I did it. The behavior has cost me some good friends; my father (who’s 96) keeps waiting for me to grow up; it got me exiled from the press, but in the end I usually felt better for getting something off my chest.

So, last week, I opened my big mouth and wrote that I would endorse somebody for President this week.

Well, the emails I got were… (I don’t know what word to use) – unsettling? But definitely heartfelt. And for a moment I regretted opening my big mouth.

But then I reminded myself that newspapers are supposed to – are expected to make election year endorsements, be it for a township board seat or for the Presidency. It’s not a law, but a long, long tradition. In a graduate level History of Journalism class I took once at the University of Nebraska, we had to read American newspapers going all the way back to the early 19^th century, and even some rare ones from the late 18^th century and they all endorsed election year candidates.

So, I told myself, if you want to be a newspaper, you need to act like one and be willing to take the heat.

However…

However (the second “however” is intentional), all the way back to when I was a rookie reporter in 1970 I sensed something about the endorsing tradition that I found unsettling, like one of those invisible dog fences around a free press.

At first, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it became clearer as time went on, noticing that newspapers only endorsed “official” candidates, the ones with their names printed on an “official” ballot.

Reporters have access to private scenes behind the screen and I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I knew from sources and personal experience that both of the “official” candidates were assholes. But because of the "tradition," the newspaper had to endorse one of the assholes just because they were the only names on the ballot, put there by corporations weirdly called “parties.”

Reporters can voice their opinion on an opinion page, but only the higher- ups get to make a newspaper’s official endorsement. I was always “just” a reporter in the corporate hierarchy because that was all I wanted to be. However, as owner of Westphalia Publishing and its newspaper, The Westphalia Periodic News, I’m the higher-up that has to make the final decision.

I had a lot of anxiety after opening my big mouth last week and reading the unsettling emails. It seemed like I was faced with an awful choice – go with tradition and endorse one of the “official” candidates, or jump the fence to find somebody who maybe could do a better job?

To help explain why I’ve decided to do what I’ve decided to do, I decided to post a video of an interview I did with a mid-term election candidate not long after Westphalia was first incorporated in 2021. It was all new technology to me and I didn't really know what I was doing, but I managed to bumble my way through it.

At the time, Diane Sare was running for the U.S. Senate in New York against Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. (She's running for the U.S. Senate again this year.)

I’d suggest watching the whole of the video posted below. You can also find it on YouTube by searching for “Westphalia Publishing Interview with Diane Sayre.” (Her last name is really Sare, but I misspelled it when I first put it up on YouTube and I don't know how to change it.)

The video is kind of long, 47 minutes, so you might want to bring popcorn and a drink.

I don’t know who I’ll secretly vote for in November, whether to check a box next to the name of an official candidate or jump the fence and write in the name of a person I’d rather see in the White House.

There are things I like about Kamala, like Medicare for all. And things I like about Trump, like the Abraham Accords. But I love Diane’s grand vision of a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts and I wholeheartedly endorse it.