Political forum tonight

The political forum will be held Thursday at the new Reynolds Center in Poteau.

This is the third forum that I have helped “moderate”.

There were two of them during the last rash of elections two years ago.

Kudos to the Poteau Chamber of Commerce and Poteau Daily News for organizing the event and to Central National Bank for sponsoring it.

I expect most of the candidates running for local office, along with the state representative and even some of the Congressional candidates will honor us with their presence.

This is a really good way to compare the apples to apples (or candidates vs. the other candidates).

All the candidates will be given a chance to introduce themselves and answer questions that have been submitted by the citizens.

During the last forums, we took questions from the audience, but that was not real easy to do. Of course, we did get some off-the-wall questions. I was the question booter last time. Hopefully this will have been done prior to the forum this time.

This will be one of the last times for the voters to listen to the candidates prior to the June 26 Primary Election.

The thing I like about these forums is you get a chance to see the candidates grouped together. We can gauge how well they speak, appearance and their knowledge of things the voters are interested in.

If it is anything like the last forums, some of the candidates will be well prepared while one or two might get caught with the old deer in the headlights look.

The forum starts at 6:30 p.m., which gives us roughly an hour and 30 minutes before the crowd disappears to check out the Thunder in the NBA finals.

I think it would be interesting to throw in some really wacko questions like if you were an animal, which animal would you be?

But I doubt the other media representatives would go for that.

So check it out tonight and get a look at our future leaders.