The myth of how the "endorsed" and the "unendorsed" are supposed to behave...

I heard about the whole Anita Lopez situation where she and/or some of her supporters put flyers on cars at the UAW hall last night, during the "Endorsed Candidate Night", I'm not a big fan of flyers on cars but this is to me is about more than just Anita. Liberal_Dem over at Politics in Mudville seems to feel that Anita was acting like a spoiled teenager. I disagree but rather than just leave it as a comment, since this is an issue I think is important I'm going to post why I disagree here.


If you are creative and you buck the system and you don't "behave" as you are supposed to it ruffles feathers. According to this myth, if you are not endorsed by the party you are not even supposed to run for office. You will discover that people that openly supported you before now don't want to appear in a photograph with you because they could face the wrath of the party. You will hear things like if you don't drop out of the race you could cause the *gasp* other guy to win, because many believe once you get that magic party endorsement that no one else should have the right to run for office. The voters are not supposed to make these decisions, these decisions are supposed to be made by the political party powers that be and many times these decisions are not based on who would be the best candidate, it's based on other factors. In some situations this is the very essence of the whole pay to play system that so many people are supposedly against. We see this over and over again in politics, "You can't run because you haven't paid your dues yet"; "You haven't done enough for the party"; "Don't run in this race and we promise we will support you for this instead"; "Well, we wanted you to run until 'he' decided to run, so please drop out"; "Sure it's a primary but you need to drop out so that we can save money for the general"; I could go on and those of you who know Ohio politics know those quotes while fictional for the purposes of this blog posting are based on accurate recent events.

The same can be said with most union endorsements. It is very similar to the way political parties select who will be endorsed, because the majority of those union members don't vote on who gets the endorsement. The endorsement process for most of our local unions and other organizations that do endorse involves a screening process. The few that are selected to make that decision do so on behalf of the larger group.

So, just like many people will have a mind of their own and vote for a candidate who is not endorsed by "their" political party, people will vote for a candidate who was not endorsed by "their" union. While I do realize that union and other endorsements are important they are just one facet of the decision that voters make as to who to support or who not to support. I look at what Anita did last night as no different than an unendorsed candidate showing up at a party event, it's saying "I know they may have picked 'him' but I want you to consider me".

There's nothing wrong with that, to me it's what our democracy is supposed to be all about, voters having the choice of who they want to elect to represent them. While in Anita's case I think she should have been there handing out the flyers rather than putting them on cars, I don't disagree with the message she was trying to send.


:-)