First in a series. 

The refreshing weather blowing through the region the past 24 hours could have been named “Anne Burke.” That is exactly the favorable impression the first-time School Board candidate is stamping on her campaign.

Eye-to-eye direct, sophisticated, elegant and teeming with ideas, Anne Burke, perhaps best of all, is candid.

She left last week’s heavily criticized Culver City Democratic Club Endorsement Party not only without an endorsement but with the unpleasant taste of stale, flakey crust spoiling her palate.

“It sounded as if those people were harboring old grudges,” Ms. Burke said over a morning libation at the lively Akasha restaurant Downtown. “I don’t understand the grievance they seem to have against UPCC (United Parents of Culver City). To me, it is not unlike someone having a grievance against PTA.

“Why,” wondered Ms. Burke, mother of a 10-year-old and 7-year-old, “would you hold a grievance against parents who want to have a more active voice in the (educational) process?”

(One explanation appears to be that in the previous School Board election, UPCC-backed candidates defeated Dem Club favorites Karlo Silbiger and Claudia Vizcarra.)

Ms. Burke was enthusiastically present three years ago at UPCC’s birth.

Walking away from the Dem Club’s non-endorsement with her running mate Scott McVarish, “we were very surprised by the backlash,” Ms. Burke said. Who were the grudge-holders? “People who are resistant to change,” she said. “Their thinking is negative. They are ready for a fight before anything has been done.”

The script, the outcome, was a finished product before the evening began, Ms. Burke believes.

“Those people were geared up to fight with us, to disagree with us before we came out and said anything,” she said.

“We didn’t know what we were ‘wrong’ about,” she said with a smile, “but we were ‘wrong’”

(To be continued)