WHAT’S SO FUNNY:Hordes hoard boards

As you drive around town for the next month or so you’ll see the new blooms in the yards and gardens of Laguna Beach — colorful signs recommending that you vote for this or that candidate.

So far this year I’ve seen that Betsy Jenkins, Theresa O’Hare and Ketta Brown are campaigning for school board. There are other candidates but I spotted these three early. I know they’ve thrown their hats in the ring because they’ve stuck their signs on the parkway.

Nobody knows exactly how helpful the signs are, but everyone agrees that name recognition is important. In “Napoleon Dynamite,” the Vote for Pedro campaign was memorable for precisely this reason. It requires some outlay, though.

Two hundred signs, I hear, will run you about $1,100, a considerable expense for items which become useless in six weeks. Once the election’s over you’re left with 200 ugly shingles.

I’m glad the signs are out there, though, because they’ve called my attention to an important election. I used to go to sleep at the mention of school board races, but I’ve learned that if you do that, you might wake up screaming.

It was a Kansas school board, after all, which voted to erase the evolutionary facts of life a few years ago. Somebody voted for those people.

Our own school board hasn’t tried to rewrite scientific history, but it has shown its own tangle-footed flair for controversy recently.

So it’s not one of those elections where you can safely vote for the candidate whose name starts with your favorite letter.

The signs may have an unintended influence here. There’s always a possibility that some voters will base their decision not on the candidate, but on the person they figure is supporting the candidate.

Many, of course, will make their choice based on first-hand knowledge of the contenders. But others, without that knowledge, may look at which neighbor has what name posted out front and base their vote on their opinion of the homeowner’s judgment.

By displaying a sign you’re going on record, as with a bumper sticker or a T-shirt. Acquaintances who are undecided can consider your stance, discernment and personality and say, “The candidate of my friend is my candidate.” Or not.

I remember Andy Rooney saying some years ago that he didn’t know whether he liked Bill Clinton, but that he liked the people who liked Clinton better than he liked the people who didn’t.

So those signs tell you not only who’s running, but who’s running alongside.

This year, for the first time, we’ve put a sign out by our mailbox. We hope it doesn’t hurt our candidate too much.