Killed any buzz on this column right at the start, didn’t I?

But I wouldn’t be surprised to see Karen Kwiatkowski pull some impressive percentage numbers, if nothing else, in her bid for the Sixth District Republican congressional nomination against 19-year incumbent Bob Goodlatte.

It might be semantics, though, with expected low turnout – assuming that 5 percent or less of the electorate will show up for the June 12 party primary.

Kwiatkowski, a Shenandoah County farmer and retired military officer, has a small but vocal base of supporters in the far right of the Valley GOP. She’s got some campaign signs up in yards and along roadways across the district, and has had some volunteers out knocking on doors on her behalf, including here in Waynesboro.

(Aside: They don’t seem to be working off anything resembling a voter list. I’ve heard from two local Democratic voters who reported front-porch encounters with Kwiatkowski volunteers. One told me that the volunteers left him telling him that he would “burn in hell” for voicing support of gay marriage, and that a neighbor had told him that the volunteers had left him with the message that “(President) Obama is a socialist.”)

So she’s trying, but I’m not getting any sense that the Kwiatkowski campaign is getting any traction with the general voter population.

Her best hope is low, low turnout overall that boosts her showing percentage-wise.

I’m handicapping the race at a win for Goodlatte with the congressman getting in the area of 70 percent of the vote overall.

One thing I’ve learned in my year in the pro rasslin’ business is that the other business that I commit a lot of my time to – the politics business – is a lot less political.

In politics, at least, you’ve got two main teams, the Democrats and the Republicans. In rasslin’, there’s no I in team, but there are enough Ms and Es to go around to make life difficult for anybody trying to make sense of it.

For example, me. I had the honor of being a member of the creative team putting together the storylines for last year’s Awesome Wrestling Entertainment “Night of Legends” pay-per-view. It was in my living room where AWE CEO Marvin Ward and I came up with the main event – “Big Sexy” Kevin Nash vs. Ricky Morton of The Rock-n-Roll Express.

It was at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Waynesboro where we came up with the idea to have Nash tear up Augusta Expo, not literally, of course.

Ward, in the storyline as an ally of Nash, was to turn on the seven-footer toward the end of the main event to side with Morton, and with the heel turn of his ally, Nash was going to suffer a controversial pinfall defeat.

Enraged at the turn of events, Nash was then going to lash out at everything that he saw on his way back to the dressing room, then file his frame into a limo as the credits rolled.

That was the plan as of the afternoon of the show. Somewhere between the final booking meeting and the lights going on, things got changed.

I’ve heard from fans who questioned the way the main-event match ended – with Nash power-bombing Morton into oblivion, then leaving the ring to get counted out by special guest referee Ronnie Garvin.

As one of the bookers, I had questions, too – as in, when Nash walked by me backstage, I asked Ward, standing next to me, “Did that just happen?”

And I’d thought Senate filibusters made no sense.

Nash was in WWE two nights later. Morton, for his part, will be back in the area Friday night, wrestling on the LTW Entertainment show at Waynesboro High School against youngster Gregory Vercitti.

If nothing else, I have to say that I like the way what I expect will be Morton’s last pay-per-view main event ended – with his hands raised in victory.

Morton was great to work with in the months leading up to the pay-per-view. He drove up from Bristol several times for video shoots that turned into Rasslin’ 101 for me. I learned more in those pow-wows than I did in a couple of semesters studying politics at UVa. as an undergrad there.

That politics stuff, I’ve come to learn, that’s easy. You want to take on figuring out something that’s a challenge, try getting two wrestling superstars to agree to play out a storyline that you’ve written and been executing for six months in front of a live crowd and a national-TV audience. I’ll take figuring out a trillion-dollar budget deficit any day.

Here’s the solution: private-school vouchers.

Yeah, sure. That’s the solution.

Private schools take in less than 10 percent of our nation’s elementary- and secondary-school students. There is surely some excess capacity that we could tap into, but how much is a question, especially considering what makes private schools most attractive to parents isn’t size but rather the lack of size.

Let’s face it – you’re not spending $15,000 a year to have your kid go to Fishburne Miltiary School as a day student or $26,400 to send him there as a boarding student so he can sit in a classroom with 25 to 30 other kids. Neither are you spending $13,400 to have your kid at Stuart Hall as a day student or $41,500 to send them there as a seven-day boarding student to have them get lost in the shuffle of a thousand-student school.

All the vouchers in the world aren’t going to get the fine, fine folks who run Fishburne or Stuart Hall to change their educational model. They know that smaller is better. The vouchers might inspire others who want to open schools to try their hand at providing a quality education; we can also expect to see more than a few charlatans figure out ways to take advantage of the money floating around looking for a home.

One thing that’s guaranteed is that the vouchers, once they’re out there floating around, will take money away from public education, unless I’m totally misreading things here and those who support the implementation of a voucher system are advocating for steep tax increases to fund them.

Another thing that you can guarantee – the kids who most need the kind of attention that smaller class sizes and more focused, individualized instruction can be brought to them won’t get that kind of access. Even the most ambitious of programs isn’t going to pay for kids who right now qualify for free and reduced lunches in schools to take a $15,000-a-year day-school slot or a $40,000-a-year boarding-school slot.

Anything less than 100 percent of tuition is going to disqualify those kids from being able to use the vouchers. And where I live, in Waynesboro, 65 percent of our elementary-school population qualifies for free and reduced lunches, so we’re talking right off the top about right around two-thirds of the kids being left behind.

The reality is that the vouchers will be used by and large by families who have already decided that a private-school education is the best option for their children and have their children enrolled. There will also be a cohort of middle-class families who use the vouchers to provide the nudge that they needed to get them into the private-school fold.

It’s not all that likely that capacity at private schools increases more than a percent or two. The same pressures on school boards related to costs in construction and maintenance of facilities will make sure of that. A relative few more middle-class kids using vouchers to go to private school will not launch a private-school construction boom.

The money committed to the vouchers does make it harder for the teachers and administrators in public schools to do what they need to do to reach out to kids like me.

Yes, I’m using myself as an example here. The son of teen parents, raised in a single-parent household in a trailer park, I was never going to go to a private school, voucher or not, but the Augusta County school system did me well enough to prepare me for college, where I graduated with honors and gained admission into several prestigious law and graduate programs before launching myself into journalism and later a successful business career.

You want to say the system is failing, that we’re throwing bad money after good, that we need to let the system fail so we can facilitate the next phase of education delivery?

I say get your head out of your ass. You want to emulate the success of private schools, then do what they do. Spend more money on more and better teachers, reduce class sizes, reduce the size of our megaschools, and put the focus back on learning, not on playing politics with our kids’ lives.

This was the typically noncommital response of my friend Eli to the question of questions at a family and friends gathering over the weekend.

Namely, Are you guys, you know …

“We get that all the time,” said his longtime roommate, Mordecai, confirming … what, exactly?

“What does it matter one way or the damned other?” our mutual friend, Ralphus, threw in, angrily, whilst pouring himself another mojito.

He had a point there. What does it matter one way or the damned other?

I’ve been trying to figure that out since my first year at college. I get to UVa. for some book-learnin’ and culturin’ and the like, and my roommate had beaten me there with posters of Broadway shows and Liza Minelli plastered all over the walls.

This will go nicely with my posters of chicks wearing barely-there bikinis, I figure, but otherwise think nothing of it.

Until some of the other guys in the suite we were sharing decided that it would be funny to use our dry-erase board to post obscene messages about what Stefan could do to his drama buddies, among other things.

I made a point of angrily taking the dry-erase board down, and despite Stefan’s incessant snoring generally stood up for him and his right to be able to live free of the bullying that he was being subjected to.

(I did take offense at his whining about Americans being boorish to him as a “citizen of the world.” But the argument that ensued, I felt, was a good sign, being able to debate across the sexual-orientation line on another matter of faux importance.)

“Hey, over here,” said Eli, trying to get the attention of the column back to the matter at hand.

Which I still don’t know what it is.

“Yes, we’re gay, whatever,” he said, putting his hand on Mordy’s knee.

“Cut that out,” Mordecai shooed his hand away.

“OK, so we’re not gay,” Eli finally conceded. “Not that we might as well not be, you know.”

“Yeah,” Mordecai observed. “I mean, we’ve been roommates for, like, 15 years.”

“And the last time,” Eli said, “either of us had sex with a woman was …”

Silence.

More silence.

Crickets chirping.

“The dating scene around here for late-thirtysomethings very much leaves a lot to be desired. Let’s just leave it at that,” Mordecai said.

And here I thought I was writing a civil-rights column.

What a waste …

“You still can, you know,” Eli said.

Um, er, how’s that again?

“We’ve been looking into one of those civil-union thingies. You know, for tax purposes,” Mordy said.

“Any idea when this gay-marriage thing will get resolved? Because we’ve got to have that one down before we can move into civil unions for whatever you’d call us,” Eli said.

It does, indeed, take all kinds.

And then you read about how it’s been getting tougher and tougher for veterans back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to deal with the overburdened Veterans Administration, and you realize – we’re not doing our part.

Chuck Layman didn’t think he’d be a statistic when he signed up for the U.S. Army out of high school. He didn’t think twice about joining the military. The only question going in was, Which branch?

Looking back on a military career that took him to Afghanistan and left him physically broken, Layman still doesn’t have any regrets on the decision to serve his country, to my utter amazement, having heard his story in detail.

But Layman also makes it clear that he feels his country hasn’t held up its end of the deal, and I tend to agree with him.

“It’s an everyday fight,” said Layman, 32, who suffered a debilitating knee injury while serving in Afghanistan, and has been dealing with injuries to his other knee and back that came about after the initial incident.

The pain from the collection of injuries was such that he was on morphine for a long spell recently. The mental anguish of post-traumatic stress disorder has gone largely unchecked, and certainly isn’t helped out by the constant back-and-forth he has to engage in with the Veterans Administration.

“I try to be nice and diplomatic, but it seems like dealing with the VA, if you’re going to be nice and let things go, they’re going to continue to give you hurdles to jump through. I’ve just gotten tired of it,” said Layman, who served in the Army and the Virginia National Guard for seven years.

He’s lost three jobs – “two really good jobs,” he said – since being discharged in 2006. Now Layman is behind on his child support to the point where his ex-wife could, he said, push the issue and have him jailed.

“She’s been somewhat lenient,” said Layman, who worries about his continued ability to put a roof over his head and food on his table given his current situation.

Layman isn’t perfect, by any means, but none of us are. He’s also been through an awful lot in his young life, and whether he volunteered for it or not, we had a deal, remember? They go fight our battles over there, and when they come back, we fight their battles for them here if they need us to.

Well, Chuck Layman needs us to fight a couple of pretty important battles for him now.

Talk about a solution looking for a problem …

According to a news brief in the News Leader, City Manager Steve Owen wants residents to be sure that it isn’t selectively enforcing the city sign ordinance.

Turns out that the signs announcing home games are in violation of said sign ordinance.

The Braves have only been putting the signs out around town announcing games, like, forever.

Next up in Staunton: no more yard-sale signs on telephone poles! Put your address on the sign at your own risk, folks. That’s telltale – they gotcha at hello, basically.

We could do without the ubiquitous signs advertising quick cash and work-at-home opportunities. My guess is, though, that we’ll still see those.

But signs announcing Braves games will be no more. According to the report in the Leader, the city is adding a line to the Braves’ lease for John Moxie Stadium in which the team will agree to abide by the city sign ordinance.

Dumb government, indeed.

The move, to say the least, is not wise, in that it basically confirms the substance of what City Councilman Mike Harris had had to say about Lucente and his approach to city government in his now-infamous (in these parts, anyway) letter to local newspapers.

In the letter, Harris took aim at Lucente for his handling of the $3.5 million land deal that saw the city buy property from a former Lucente campaign donor, calling the deal a “secret deal” and disparaging Lucente more generally for his handling of city-government matters.

Lucente won re-election to his at-large seat on City Council in the May 1 elections with 52 percent of the vote, not exactly a resounding reaffirmation from the electorate, given that Lucente had won re-election in 2008 with more than 60 percent of the vote in a three-way race. Ticketmate Tim Williams won in Ward A by a much-narrower 23-vote margin, but ostensibly Williams is in league with Lucente on the special Friday-morning meeting along with Vice Mayor Bruce Allen.

That the meeting will begin briefly as an open meeting before turning into a closed session is what will confirm Harris’ critiques of Lucente in his pre-election letter. And that’s what I would have said to Lucente as his adviser if I would have been asked to weigh in on the matter. For all the talk post-election about wanting to reach out to voters who had pushed for a different direction in the tightly-contested city elections, it’s clear that the new City Council will get off to much the same start as the City Council seated in 2008 after Lucente, Williams and Allen swept to victory in that election cycle and then cleaned house in City Hall, pushing then-City Manager Doug Walker out the door at the beginning of a forced exodus of department heads that set city government back several months.

That is to say, for all the talk before the election that Lucente, Williams and Allen were presenting an alternative vision to what their challengers were promoting about moving Waynesboro forward, it’s apparent from the calling of this special Friday-morning meeting that what they’re really all about is power – pure, raw and unadulterated.

That’s the messsage that they’re sending, anyway.

God forbid they actually vote to censure Harris and fellow Councilman Jeff Freeman, who backed what Harris said in his letter in comments to local media reporting on the release of the letter.

If anything more than an uncomfortable closed-door discussion takes place Friday morning, all hell will break loose in City Hall, and it may soon be time for city voters to begin thinking about what they can do to recall the entire group to start over from scratch.

Spending a day with the frustrated junior senator on Capitol Hill a few weeks ago, well, I kinda gave myself away there, calling him frustrated. It was clear to me that Warner could do without being forced to be the guy to bang the gavel to open and close the Senate on Mondays and Fridays so that other members can make speeches on C-SPAN that nobody will watch, among other things.

The deepest source of frustration for the Democrat is that the two party caucuses don’t seem to even want to deal with each other. He demonstrated this to me as we walked toward a closed-door lunch with the Senate Democratic Caucus.

The Republicans have their own closed-door lunch, Warner said. And he imagines that the GOP does in its closed-door lunch what the Democrats do in theirs – plot strategy on how to advance their agenda, how to get their bills to move forward, how to win the political scorecard at the end of the day.

I think that Warner expected when he ran for the Senate in 2008 that he could be a driving force for breaking through that logjam. Look back at his record as governor of Virginia from 2002-2006. Working with Republican majorities in the House of Delegates and State Senate, Warner was able to achieve budget, schools and transportation reforms that pushed Virginia into the realm of being named the best managed state in America and the best state to do business in the nation.

Then he goes to the Senate, and he’s stuck talking with Democrats and banging the gavel for TV cameras when party leaders want to go back home.

My insight, such as it is, into what Warner might do in regard to the 2013 Virginia governor’s race comes from a couple of offhand remarks from Warner made while we were walking Capitol Hall and another set of comments from staffers.

I can’t say that there was anything at all even close to being definitive as to what the senator might be thinking. I’ll also say that I was not dissuaded from thinking that Warner might be at least privately considering making a run.

The numbers from Public Policy Polling last week that have Warner cleaning the clocks of the GOP field if he were to enter the race show the stakes at play. The two leading non-Warner Democratic Party candidates, Terry McAuliffe and Tom Perriello, would be locked in tight races with Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

And Warner clearly still pays close attention to what goes on in Richmond. He told me that he was “disappointed” in the tone of the General Assembly in its 2012 session, with House Republicans pushing an extreme social-issue agenda that made Virginia a laughingstock on late-night comedy TV.

“I don’t think that’s where most Virginians are at in terms of what they want the legislature to deal with, which is, how do we make sure our schools are good and our roads are fixed and we stay pro-business and also stay a state that’s moving forward in terms of job growth. Instead we became the brunt of late-night jokes, and Virginia became an outlier state. I don’t think that’s good for the state or good for business,” Warner said.

Does this sound like a guy who hasn’t at least thought about maybe running for governor in 2013?

And I say loosely defined because the word progressive means something very different in Waynesboro than it does just about everywhere else in the country.

In California, for example, progressive means, well, what it means in California. The progressive coalition backing the three challengers in Tuesday’s City Council elections includes people who would get laughed out of progressive meetings in California, not that they’d try to go.

Counted among Waynesboro’s progressives are numerous lifelong Republicans, committed Republicans, whose only slightest leaning toward being progressive is that they think the city should spend a little more, which is to say, something more than nothing, on economic development and the public schools, not to mention the city’s crumbling infrastructure.

And then there are the independents, and the Democrats, whose number includes me, whose record as a Democrat includes my single meeting as a UVa. Young Democrat, during which I realized that I may have thought of myself as a Democrat back home in Waynesboro, but I wasn’t one of those Democrats.

That’s my way of saying, we’re not talking about us Waynesboro progressives being tax-and-spend liberals, not by a long shot. We get called that, but our tax-and-spend liberals actually cut taxes in the rare times that they’ve had the reins of power in local politics.

Their sin, our sin, I should say – that we’re not died-in-the-wool do-nuthins.

We think our city needs to invest in economic development and education. It’s our opinion that the fact that the only jobs that our kids can look forward to after graduation involve serving food or folding sweaters is cause for alarm for the future existence of our city. And that borrowing $3.5 million to buy land that we will let sit idle for 20 years with the grand plan to resell it at what will likely be a marginal profit at best is the height of folly.

A bare majority of city residents who voted today disagree with us. They don’t seem to have any sort of operating philosophy, other than that they don’t like us. I get this from people sometimes – that I sometimes use big words in normal everyday conversation, that maybe I need to bring it down a notch. I was called an elitist on the blogs and the campaign trail four years ago, and it made me laugh until it made me cry.

Only in Waynesboro can one grow up in a trailer park in a single-parent family, work one’s way through college, start a successful business from scratch and be labeled an elitist.

It took me literally almost all of the next two years to get over losing the 2008 election, and how I lost it. In that time, I often questioned myself, and sometimes publicly, why I was still here, when life would be so much easier, and business so much more profitable, somewhere else, anywhere else.

I settled on the answer that had motivated me to run for City Council in the first place. This is home, same for me as it is for the do-nuthins, more so for me, if you want to split hairs. Both sides of my family have been in this part of the Valley dating back to the earliest settling of the Valley in the 1730s and 1740s. Which is to say, I’m not some carpetbaggin’ liberal from New York working in Charlottesville at the high-falutin’ University telling you how you ought to do things. I’m as Waynesboro as anybody else, and more than most.

And I’m tired, damn tired, of seeing kids like friends of mine who received good educations in our local school system look at their job prospects after graduation and decide to move on to make other parts of the world better places to live.

And I’m tired, damn tired, of hearing the do-nuthins call our kids derogatory names – before the local papers shut down their anonymous blogs, the term “precious darlings” was en vogue by those who wished to delegitimize concerns raised by parents and teachers about school funding.

I’m damn tired of seeing the powers-that-be study and plan and talk about what they’re going to do and then not do it.

And I’m damn tired of accepting that it just is the way it is, and I can’t change it.

I can change it, you can change it. Anybody can change it. All of us can change it. Not today, obviously. We lost another election today. We’re getting good at that.

Why do we keep losing? Simple. We keep playing the game using the other guys’ rules on their field and their ball. All the mayor has to do is say the words Wayne Theatre, and our side starts falling all over each other about how to respond.

Oh, dear, he said Wayne Theatre. The election is lost.

With that attitude, yes, it is. Because actually what we’re saying is, We were hoping to be able to get enough of the voters who otherwise consistently vote for the do-nuthins to peel away and change their votes to be able to pull this one out, but, well, he said Wayne Theatre, so now that ain’t happenin’.

Does anybody but me see how much bullshit there is inherent in that way of thinking?

You don’t win an election by writing a couple of big checks, buying some signs, making sure the candidates knock on doors, put out a hard-hitting mailer or two and then get the plans for the victory party cranked up in time to secure the services of a good bartender.

You want to win the next election? You start tomorrow morning, and you don’t do it thinking you want to win the next election.

This is how I’ve kept myself sane in the two years since I was able to figure out how to recover from losing in 2008. Whether or not the do-nuthins want us to do anything, we can do what we want to do. They want to make the Wayne Theatre a thorn in our side? How about we open the damn thing up and sell it out a few times a month and show them that the business plan that we’ve been working on for 10 years has been viable all along? Wouldn’t that be a swift kick to the groin of their tried-and-true strategy?

How about we pool our resources and assist entrepreneurs looking to open shops and restaurants and high-tech business and industry in locations across town? So what if the city doesn’t want to be a partner. Screw ‘em.

And how about we not wait until a few weeks before the next election before we start getting people organized to have their voices heard on school issues and issues involving older persons in our community and the homeless and those who have substance-abuse and mental-health issues?

There’s a way to combat the perpetual apathy that plagues among the affecteds that plagues us every other May – not giving ourselves the time off needed to develop apathy.

This is all, of course, much easier said than done, and it hasn’t been easily said, given how long it’s taken me to spill all of this out.

The immediate aftermath of yet another unsuccessful election is the perfect time for kvetching and throwing in the towel and glooming and dooming and related nonsense.

Again, I was there. Took me two years to figure out which end was up. I’m not criticizing except as one still in rehab over a tough election loss that I’m probably never going to get fully over, despite my protestations.

The seeds of victory are always planted in defeat. We know how to do this. In a way, we’re already doing it, if you think about it. We lost today’s election by small margins with an electorate that was almost entirely of our rivals’ choosing. We almost beat them today using their rules on their field with their ball.

Will we continue to play a game that we know that we’re going to lose? We need to learn from our mistakes and grow toward the next time, and yes, dark as your night might be tonight, there will be a next time.

Now, long term, you’re not going to be nearly as productive as you were before. That limb clearly did you a lot of good before you had it lopped off. Made it easier to walk, or if it was an arm that you decided to do without for the sake of weight loss, carry stuff.

This about sums up my thoughts on the upcoming City Council elections in Waynesboro. You really can’t cut your way to prosperity.

Not that the supposedly fiscally conservative City Council currently in place can be said to be at all interested in cutting anything. Let’s face facts – this is the group that is rolling the dice with $3.5 million of your money on the hopes that the scrub brush that they bought from two friends of the mayor will appreciate in resale value in 20 years.

Seriously, this is the plan. They’re speculating with $3.5 million of your money at a time when we supposedly can’t afford another $70,000 to replace unsafe bleachers at the football field at Waynesboro High School, and now the WHS graduation has had to be moved to Harrisonburg because we can’t have people sitting in those unsafe bleachers.

All due to the idea idea that the land will appreciate in value over time, which itself is as likely to be a pipe dream given the new real-estate economy than anything else. The house that I’m buying on South Wayne is a case in point of how things can go in the other direction – having originally been on the market four years ago at $249,000, and now going toward closing at $158,000.

So the cuts that the supposed conservatives in charge right now make their priority are selective at best. Cut inconvenient items like bleachers and teachers and teacher pay – and fire stations that city voters approve in referendums, you know, insignificant little things that cities can do without. And in the meantime, make sure there’s enough in the coffers to reward the good ol’ boys for making sure that you get back into office.

But cutting things to the bones is at least the operating philosophy behind the current City Council majority. Even if they were the penny pinchers that they claimed to be, the theory doesn’t work in practice. Then you get to reality, where stealing from our kids’ future, and thus our own, to pay off political debts does more to undermine our prosperity than cutting off our nose would do to spite our face.