Big meeting last night at the Montgomery County Democratic Party’s Headquarters. The party endorsed primary candidates for the Ohio House and the Ohio Senate. At the previous meeting in October, my motion to discontinue the practice of making early endorsements was soundly defeated, so this action by the party last night, though depressing, was not surprising.

I’m sort of a newcomer to all this — I was elected to the Central Committee in 2006 — I’ve had a lot to learn about how the party actually works. I’m learning that the Selection Committee is the key committee of the county party organization. All of the key people in the party are members of the Selection Committee and it is this committee that actually chooses candidates to be endorsed. I’ve never seen any decision by the Selection Committee ever be overturned.

At every monthly meeting, the Executive Committee meets at 7:00 PM and reviews the evening’s agenda and, by vote, makes specific recommendations to the Central Committee which meets at 7:30 PM. The Central Committee, the official legislative body of the group, always agrees with the Executive Committee. It is an organizational structure that would have pleased Joe Stalin, because control of important decisions is condensed to only a few people. And of those few people, one person, the chairperson, usually has disproportionate power.

At the Executive Committee Meeting last night, I moved that the endorsements for primary candidates be delayed one month until the January meeting so that the endorsements would be made after the filing deadline for primary candidates, which is January 4.

My argument to the Executive Committee to delay endorsement was the same as before. I said that the Democratic Party should take no actions that would give the appearance that, in any way, it wanted to suppress democracy. I reminded the group that the Republican Party had made endorsements in July and had been roundly ridiculed for their antidemocratic action by the Dayton Daily News in an editorial illustrated by noted cartoonist, Mike Peters. (I made a post in July, “Montgomery County Republicans Take Action That Effectively Suppresses Grassroots Democracy,” that printed the Peter’s cartoon and quoted excerpts from the DDN editorial.)

I said that the hallmark of the Democratic Party should be the fact that we are the party of the people, that we are the party of democracy, and that waiting another month to make endorsements would probably not impact who the endorsed candidate would be anyway.

My argument would have made a lot of sense if, in fact, endorsement was the issue. But endorsement is not the issue. The reason the Executive Committee would not delay its endorsements until our next meeting is the fact that the central issue is not who to endorse. The central issue is how to suppress the primary process. If endorsement was delayed until after the filing deadline, then all interested candidates necessarily would have already filed and their names already printed on the primary ballot. As it is, even though would-be candidates have already circulated petitions and are prepared to officially file, candidates have been waiting on the party’s endorsement and, because of the party’s endorsements last night, most un-endorsed candidates simply will drop out and will not make an effort to run as un-endorsed primary candidates.

The discussion in the Executive Committee confirmed my view that this process should not be call a process of endorsement at all, because after all, what difference could it possibly make to delay an endorsement for a few weeks? What this process should be called is a process of discouragement. The Party simply doesn’t want more than one Democratic candidate in each primary race. And therefore, all potential candidates, other than one, are discouraged from filing. It is really sort of amazing. Of course, not all un-endorsed potential candidates drop out and I hope that a few can be convinced to stay in the race. I told the Executive Committee that I, for one, intended to telephone each person who has petitions for office in circulation and urge him or her to stay in the race.

It seems to me, the whole reason why a primary system for candidate selection was set up in the first place was to help political parties give their constituents more choice. In our Executive Committee meeting, I expressed that idea and in the discussion that followed, one Executive Committee member made a comment so amazing I wrote it down: “The time to make that choice is in the general election, not the primary.”

I said that I felt strongly that taking action designed to suppress primary activity was against the values that most Democrats believe in, and that if we were to act as a representative body we needed to take those actions that would represent the values of most Democrats. I said I was trying to speak up for — as Dean had said — “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”

Most of the Executive Committee members attending the meeting are also members of the Selection Committee and were involved in making the endorsement choices. I was asking them to change their minds, but they were set in their decision, and, my motion went nowhere. There were several tepid “Ayes” voting to accept and a roaring “No” voting to reject.

The Montgomery County Democratic Party this evening, at its Central Committee Meeting, in separate unanimous actions agreed to endorse all of the primary candidates recommended by its Selection Committee. It was reported that at the Selection Committee Endorsement Meeting there were 47 members who voted on the endorsements.

The Central Committee was acting on recommendations from the Executive Committee. The issue of the timing of endorsements had been discussed at the last Executive and the last Central Committee meeting in October and a motion to delay endorsement had been defeated at that meeting. This issue of delaying endorsements was raised again at this evening’s Executive Committee and, again, by a large margin the Executive Committee defeated a motion to delay. The deadline for candidates to file is January 4.

The MCDP voted to endorse the following candidates as Democratic candidates for the following offices: 36th Ohio House District, Chuck Norton; 37th OHD no endorsement; 38th OHD, Susan Lemish; 39th OHD, Clayton Luckie; 40th OHD, Roland Windburn; 6th Ohio Senate District, John Doll. In addition, the party endorsed John Froelich for judge (I didn’t catch the court). The MCDP made no endorsement for anyone to fill the Office of Coroner.

Most interestingly, the Selection Committee made no endorsement for either the 3rd U.S. House District or the 8th U.S. House District — the two House of Representative Districts in Montgomery County. At the Central Committee Meeting, MCDP chairperson, Mark Owens, indicated that Jane Mitakides had recently expressed an interest in becoming the Democratic Party’s candidate for the 3rd U.S. House District. He invited Ms Mitakides to the platform and she spoke, I thought, convincingly and well. But the Central Committee, by vote, determined to keep the primary candidate selection process open and chose not to endorse anyone for the 3rd U.S. House District — until after the January 4th deadline to file.

After the October meeting, I made this post: The Mission of the Democratic Party Should Be to Empower Democracy to Work
Earlier in October, I made this post: “The Big Questions Facing Our Democracy Are Too Important To Allow Political Parties to Decide”

The National Review, saying their “guiding principle has always been to select the most conservative viable candidate,” has endorsed Mitt Romney to be the Republican candidate for president.

Excerpts from the article:

• Unlike some other candidates in the race, Romney is a full-spectrum conservative: a supporter of free-market economics and limited government, moral causes such as the right to life and the preservation of marriage, and a foreign policy based on the national interest. While he has not talked much about the importance of resisting ethnic balkanization — none of the major candidates has — he supports enforcing the immigration laws and opposes amnesty. Those are important steps in the right direction.
• John McCain is not as conservative as Romney. He sponsored and still champions a campaign-finance law that impinged on fundamental rights of political speech; he voted against the Bush tax cuts; he supported this year’s amnesty bill, although he now says he understands the need to control the border before doing anything else.
• Fred Thompson is as conservative as Romney, and has distinguished himself with serious proposals on Social Security, immigration, and defense. But Thompson has never run any large enterprise — and he has not run his campaign well, either.
• Romney is an intelligent, articulate, and accomplished former businessman and governor. At a time when voters yearn for competence and have soured on Washington because too often the Bush administration has not demonstrated it, Romney offers proven executive skill. He has demonstrated it in everything he has done in his professional life, and his tightly organized, disciplined campaign is no exception. He himself has shown impressive focus and energy.
• Like any Republican, he would have an uphill climb next fall. But he would be able to offer a persuasive outsider’s critique of Washington. His conservative accomplishments as governor showed that he can work with, and resist, a Demo°©crat°©ic legislature. He knows that not every feature of the health-care plan he enacted in Massachusetts should be replicated nationally, but he can also speak with more authority than any of the other Republican candidates about this pressing issue. He would also have credibility on the economy, given his success as a businessman and a manager of the Olympics.
• Some conservatives question his sincerity. It is true that he has reversed some of his positions. But we should be careful not to overstate how much he has changed. In 1994, when he tried to unseat Ted Kennedy, he ran against higher taxes and government-run health care, and for school choice, a balanced budget amendment, welfare reform, and “tougher measures to stop illegal immigration.” He was no Rockefeller Republican even then.
• We believe that Romney is a natural ally of social conservatives. He speaks often about the toll of fatherlessness in this country. He may not have thought deeply about the political dimensions of social issues until, as governor, he was confronted with the cutting edge of social liberalism. No other Republican governor had to deal with both human cloning and court-imposed same-sex marriage. He was on the right side of both issues, and those battles seem to have made him see the stakes of a broad range of public-policy issues more clearly. He will work to put abortion on a path to extinction. Whatever the process by which he got to where he is on marriage, judges, and life, we’re glad he is now on our side — and we trust him to stay there.
• He still has some convincing to do with other conservatives. Romney has been plagued by the sense that his is a passionless, paint-by-the-numbers conservatism. If he is to win the nomination, he will have to show more of the kind of emotion and resolve he demonstrated in his College Station “Faith in America” speech.
• More than the other primary candidates, Romney has President Bush’s virtues and avoids his flaws. His moral positions, and his instincts on taxes and foreign policy, are the same. But he is less inclined to federal activism, less tolerant of overspending, better able to defend conservative positions in debate, and more likely to demand performance from his subordinates. A winning combination, by our lights. In this most fluid and unpredictable Republican field, we vote for Mitt Romney.

From The National Review Online, “Romney for President,” written by the editors of The National Review