Herewith my annual — and just as frequently ignored — plea.

Vote.

Tuesday's elections for City Council are important, with two interesting contests.  One will be to select At-large City Councilors.  The other is to select a new councilor for District Eight, which includes Beacon Hill and Back Bay. The latter is a race of particular interest to me, since I currently hold the District Eight seat.

Both races are preliminaries not "primaries".  Primaries are elections held by Democrats or Republicans to select their nominees for a general election.  Preliminaries are nonpartisan; they narrow the field down in advance of the general election.  In the At-large race, the preliminary will narrow the field down to eight (which is not such a big deal, since only nine are running in all.) In the November general election, you'll be able to vote for up to four candidates with the top four finishers being elected City Councilors.

The preliminary for District Eight will narrow the field from seven down to two.  Those two top finishers will then go head-to-head in the November election.

City Council races are easy to caricature because they often seem to be issue-less.  I have looked in vain for the candidate who likes rats on the street, doesn't think potholes are a big deal, thinks it's okay if the city loses its middle class population, and wants the Boylston Street Millennium project to be taller.  No such candidates are to be found.

So if no one disagrees on issues, does this just become a contest of personalities?  Hardly.  City issues like the ones cited above are all peace and love issues — that is, everyone wants peace, everyone wants love.  So too does everyone want rat-free streets, smooth pavement, a robust middle class and appropriate development.  The question, of course, is how does one accomplish these goals?

It's easy to have smooth roadways, for example.  Don't allow utilities to dig up streets, allocate a lot of money to road crews and repave at the first sign of any flaw.  Of course, that may not sit too well with the resident who doesn't have electricity because Boston Edison isn't allowed to repair her line.  It may not sit well with school children who no longer have books because the education budget was cut so that public works could be boosted.  And it may not sit well with drivers who can no longer move on city streets because they're all blocked with road crews.

But the roads will be smooth.

Good government requires people to think through their priorities, to balance various needs against each other, and to think creatively about how to accomplish change.  Good politicians do this, and the best candidates for the District Eight seat, or the At-large seat, will be those that shy away from easy answers and who are willing to listen, explore and examine.

There's more to it than that, however.  Some candidates offer little more than a relentless focus on micro-issues and a hunger to win.  The better candidates bring experience and understanding to the job.  They try to think about city issues in some broader context, one that combines ideology along with a well-thought sense of where Boston has been, where it is now and, most importantly, where it should go.  It's the old "vision-thing" that George "sans-W" Bush never got.  That vision thing matters even more on the Council level.  The truth is that the issues people debate today will probably not be the issues which they'll be called to vote on when in office.  What guides them in those votes?  Are they simply pawns of whatever interest groups happens to have their ear?  Do they simply follow the lead of the rest of the Council or of the Mayor?  Or do they think for themselves — and if so, what guides their thinking?

It's not just a beauty contest.  In the last few weeks the Council has debated everything from affirmative action to the First Amendment's establishment clause.  It can be heady stuff.  It would be good if we had a councilor with a head to match.