Why candidate selection is broken

Article by Aneurin on October 12th, 2007 at 3:52 am

For those who were unclear as to how to get to the link provided earlier regarding VaNessa L. Duplessie’s 2005 Life-Pac responses, here’s the full images taken from the Internet’s Wayback Machine:

Disclaimer: The original image length and width were modified in order to fit the blog formatting width limitations of this site, nothing else has been tampered with.

I’m sorry, but if this kind of information can come up with some simple Google searching, why can’t the party infrastructure do the same? Or worse, did the party infrastructure stumble across this survey and decide that it was acceptable? No amount of coaching or position reappraisal can get around these positions so clearly stated in black and white.

If the party infrastructure decided that they could live with an anti-choice Democrat in the 18th Legislative District due to poor electoral performance in the past, that’s a sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party today. With 2008 looking to be a once in a generation blue wave election, there’s really no need to have compromise candidates. Independent voters are looking to the Democrats to stand up and fight for Constitutional values for free speech, freedom from wiretapping, and freedom from intrusion into one’s body.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Well meaning progressives in the ’sphere are more than happy to assist the party in the candidate vetting process. Instead, we’re told “you’re amateurs, leave the candidate selection to the professionals!” (hiss!). Ultimately, allowing these kinds of mistakes is simply sloppy. The end result is unhappiness on all sides.

Now is a great time for everyone to take a deep breath and open up some lines of communication, rather than cut people off for some perceived slight that happened during the Dean days. When everyone is consulted and has buy in to the process, the slate of candidates can only be stronger. The alternative is a system where bloggers with nothing better to do search for any information they can find, since the party isn’t forthcoming.