Category: primaries

I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating

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It’s a cheap shot today and return after a long absence.

The Primaries are going on today in Virginia.  So far it looks like a par for course run; the races that are close are going to be driven by the grassroots support that is drummed up during these off-season primaries while strong incumbents and those who are historied within the wall of their respective parties will clinch their nominations with little difficulty.  That doesn’t bother me.  Shenanigans bother me, and I’ve been listening to them for months.

The purpose of the Republican Primary was to ensure that there was ‘purity’ in the selection of the candidates that were chosen last month.  There was the need for this to be ‘honest’ and ‘clear of meddling’.  Rush Limbaugh refers to these yet to materialize, and oft worried about, efforts at tampering ‘Operation Chaos’.  The gist is simple: open primaries mean that Democrats can roll in to the polling station and supposedly pick the weaker of two candidates, effectively setting up their “strong” candidate with an easy win.  If the yarn sounds familiar, it was kicked around in 2008 when McCain was winning much to the chagrin of the Republican party.  It was rolled out again in 2012 when Mitt Romney was facing supposedly impossible odds against the titanic political powers of Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman, and (seriously?) Rick Santorum.

Therein lies the problem.  Since the end of the Primary, and the wretched result that has me wincing each morning I have to listen to John Fredericks talk about the latest train wreck of a video someone has dug up on the Virginia Lieutenant Governor nominee E.W. Jackson, the discussion has shifted from the need for purity in the selection process to encouraging our team to go out and vote during the open primaries for the other side.  Granted, there are primaries today for Republican candidates, and to those I say go nuts, have a ball.  For the Democratic candidates and races I wonder where the wagging tail ends and the dog begins.

Now, I enjoy Mr. Fredericks’ show, and have so since I discovered it on a drive to work one morning last year, but I take pause with his notion that voting in the Democrats open primary is perfectly acceptable after our party went to such great lengths to prevent such actions.  It is, of course, his choice, and he chose to exercise that, and in no way am I saying it’s bad.  I’ve met Senator Northam, at the end of election night where I was working for the team that was trying to take his seat, and found him most agreeable, articulate, and, to borrow common vernacular, very real.  As Fredericks said, and so I shall reiterate, what you see from Northam is what you get.   No, I have no problem with his selection, but I’m saying the action of voting for a democrat after you’ve selected your Republican candidate feels…awkward.  It invites analysis by others, and recognition of the inherit weakness of the primary system; any Tom, Dick, or Harry can roll into a polling station and vote for a rep from their state or district.

After the utter, pardon the following, shitcan mess that was the Republican primary in May, why on earth would we advertise, nay, encourage our huddled masses, who were terrified of the bogeyman of cross-platform voters, to go out and do the very thing we decried as fouling the process?  It is hypocritical to demand a pure representation of a party, then to encourage our team to go out and muddy the waters for the other side.  There is no honor in it.

Stars out of the eyes, I understand that, mathematically, the Republican turnout for a Democratic primary is going to be low (maybe 0.25-0.5% of the Republican voting block, so 0.10-0.35% of the overall voting block for the district), but the notion is noxious to me.  If we are going to claim moral high ground it means constant diligence.  Moral strength comes from the ability to act consistently, and in the political world consistency, if measured in gold, would be worth the national debt and a few dollars more.  Lastly, if Mr. Fredericks is going to champion the notion of selecting a candidate based on his authenticity and amicable nature in working across the aisle, maybe closing a post out by talking about the unique opportunity to take Senator Northam’s seat in a special election should probably be saved for another day.  Especially when you are reminding folks that Northam’s vote, if taken, would tip the balance to 21-19 in favor of the Republicans who, at the moment have a very, very weak candidate running for the coveted tie-breaker known as, you guessed it, the Lt. Governor of Virginia.  I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you, Mr. Fredericks, to cover yourself; your machinations are showing.

Sanity reigns in the Old Dominion but it isn’t stopping the show

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On Friday a highly anticipated decision regarding the appearance of Primary candidates who couldn’t muster enough support to be placed on the Virginia ballot came down, and it was an absolute delight.   The Hon. John A Gibney Jr. echoed what many had said over the weeks leading up to this (copy of the decision provided care of Politico): “In essence, they played the game, lost and then complained that the rules were unfair.”

I saw former Speaker of the House New Gingrich as being the sole individual who might even have a modicum of a chance in the challenge, with the disparate rules regarding those who get over 10,000 signatures and those who get over 15,000 signatures.  So, when he didn’t file the suit, and it was Rick “I barely pulled off half of what was required” Perry, it was doomed to fail.  When Santorum and Huntsman jumped on board, it was an obvious grab, like those who aren’t directly affected by a particular event, but jump onto a civil lawsuit pocket some ill-gotten reward, the theatre of the situation only worsened. The most galling of notes, aside from the Huntsman/Santorm scam attempt, was that Gingrich did not file  notice of intent to run for office in Virginia until 22 December 2011.  For those unaware, signature collection began on 1 July 2011.

The argument that if the candidates had access to the horde of out-of-state petition gatherers (of the paid variety I imagine) that they would have easily trumped the 10,000 signature requirement is dubious at best.  Judge Gibney pointed out in his decision that there are over five million registered voters in Virginia, and close to two million participated in the last statewide election.  Cut down the middle that means that there were one million active voters that should have been available to had their doors knocked and said yes or no.  If all candidates had hit those doors, and assuming a one in ten chance of success, that still leaves roughly 100,000 voter signatures, more than enough for all of the candidates combined, and room for a few more.  Another point of disclosure, a registered voter can sign for more than one candidate.

I will give a local example to ply exactly how poorly these men failed: Ben Loyola, a local businessman, ran for State Senate last year.  During his campaign he is said to have knocked on over 50,000 doors personally.  After the campaign events were done for the night, barring it wasn’t too late, he along with his campaign manager and body man would head out to a section of the district he was running for and started on a block, and away he would go.  Sometimes only 20 houses in a night, sometimes north of 100.  Either way, he was on the ground personally.  Come election day Mr. Loyola, sadly, did not win, but pulled in over 10,000 votes.  Those in the game have said the door to actual vote ration is somewhere in the 10:1 range.  If a local businessman can walk from the Hampton Roads area to the border of Maryland looking for support on what would be even less than a shoe-string budget compared to a national campaign, then all of these individuals running for President could have gotten the word out, or, at the least, made a damn appearance in the state.  A Gingrich event at a park, cordinated with one of the Tea Party organizations would have brought hundred, mayhaps a few thousand.

What happened in earnest, is that the candidate didn’t put their foot forward, and in the case of Santorum and Huntsman, they flatly didn’t give a damn (Santorum did gather signatures, but since he never filed a notice to run in the state of Virginia, the signatures were turned away).  Those in Virginia now roaring to the Heavens about the intolerable nature of it all, and the vile laws that govern the way it goes have forgotten that their signature and their options on the ballot are driven not only by their keen interest in a candidate, but in the candidate’s campaign to do the bare minimum.  Santorum is a perfect example with the  thousands spent in Virginia to gather the roughly 8,000 signatures, then to have them turned away because he didn’t fill out the needed paperwork.  He, himself, and his campaign managers, national and Virginia, are bearers of  blame there.

Virginia is not some evil society of string-pulling puppeteers winnowing the field of choices down to the guy they kinda-don’t-like and the one that is getting run over because he sounds crazy saying in public what we’ve been chatting about over kitchen tables for the last twenty years.  The law is in place, followed for decades, and performed as intended.  Should someone fail to follow the letter of the law, there is a punishment that goes along with that.  Those who cannot even follow that simple dictum have no place running for the highest office in the land.  If they can’t figure out one state’s requirements for a simple primary petition, how can we have any faith that they will be able to grasp the issue then  provide educated insight and leadership on topics far, far more complex?

Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves…

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We’ve now seen the full Circus.  The major players have performed their acts.  The clowns are in their car puttering off the floor, the rings are thoroughly beaten down with the prints of every elephant contending for the spotlight, and the audience is just as confused and disoriented than they were upon entering the tent.  Tragic, is it not, how easily the pageantry and absurdity of the circus reflects the ebb and tide of the pre-primary seasons for the Republican party.

What we saw was a rise of individual stars who would burn out as quickly as they blazed into the spotlight leaving behind only hollow bodies in the vast expanse of the political space.  Like those burned out stars, they leave husks that either disappear with time, or continue to flicker on, acting more as an irritant or pouring out continuous drivel and noxious commentary that provides nothing more to the current political discourse than a nauseating reminder that at one point a significant number of people believed them capable of winning an election for President.

No, this thirteen ring circus has done nothing for our party, and it surely has done no good for the political process.  A fellow follower of politics stated that he believed this was a maturing of the party’s political savvy.  A method by which the body politic separated the wheat from the chaff and would winnow our candidates down to those most deserving.  I wanted to agree with him, but I had the feeling that this was too “celebrity” with the likes of Palin and Trump toting about the ever ambiguous hash of a campaign not yet announced.

I, along with a goodly number of people, look back and realize that it wasn’t about winnowing the wheat from the chaff.  The process was not about locating the best candidate, nor was it about finding the best Republican to run.  There was an ebb and flow to the entire affair.  Someone came in, shined brighter because the harsh spotlight was on someone else, and they, by lack of close scrutiny, became the best candidate for the job by proxy.  The light would shift, the audience would become enthralled with the new champion of the right, and so the cycle began anew.  It was faddish in the most derogatory form of the word.  The herd ran where the press led with signs highlighting word choice and bold, but ultimately mindless, plans.  Catchphrases replaced worldly experience, education on policy trumped by showmanship, and knee-jerk responses became the headlines rather than the cultured response of, not those who happened to read the paper from the day before, but from those who had done this sort of thing before.

The most sickening part of the show comes from two sad players in the run of any show.  There is a director, an individual who through instruction and cultivation of his actors has created the spectacle before you.  In this sad and sallow case we happen to have two on hand.  The litany of Tea Parties and the surprisingly quiet Republican National Committee.

The Tea Party has rushed to the center of the ring as a barker possessed of a need to upstage the existing ringmaster.  It has become a monumentally disastrous initiative that has done little more than chisel away at a what little firmament there was in the base of the party.  All the while the RNC, the chosen ringmaster of this show for nigh on decades now sits somberly by, not wishing to interfere or to interject itself into state level politics, having been burned or spurned by those groups in the last round of elections.  The rally cry and subsequent victories of the tea party in the public eye shocked the RNC into a sort of fugue state that now threatens to undermine the organization as a whole.

We have one ringmaster who has a faint idea of what they are doing and another who appears to be asleep at the wheel, and one wonders why the field has yet to be winnowed down.  I understand that are arguments to the effect that the voters must decide who is the most viable candidate, and to those arguments I will concur wholeheartedly, but that only applies if the voters are willing to decide.  The day of the primaries is not the time to hop into a booth and play enie-menie-minie-mo with the candidate pictures on the touch screen.  If they have been weighed and measured then the truest test comes when asking if they are found wanting.  Only when the audience decides to boo one of the shows off the stage will the ringmasters even begin to pay attention.  Then, and maybe then we will see some serious discussions.  The time for debate is, sadly, over, and now we are to march out of the tent and to the polls to decide which elephant danced the best in the center ring.  To wait for one of the performers to be shamed off stage out of their own self-interest rather than because the audience finds them unfit is a horrifying indications of how desperate the voter base is to hang on to an idol no matter how temporary.

Should we ever reach the conclusion that none of the candidates could put on a noteworthy performance and were being held up by gross expectations of the biggest player in this entire farce we are well and truly lost because “a good try” will guarantee a failure in 2012.