Some kind soul sent me an email recommending that I throw my hat into the ring and run for state DFL Party Chair. I think I’ll kill him.
No. Hell, no, Nada. Nein. And not a prayer.
There was a time when my ambition exceeded both my talent and popularity, but I’m far too old and, while my energy level is only fair, my ambition to serve in any political office, well, let’s say run for a political office, is nil. Who would want to consume the kind of time and energy to run for a “no-win” office? Actually, I chaired Senate District 65 for a time in the early 80’s. It had its moments, but it didn’t take long to alienate enough people to vote me out the next time around. Thank god.
This is no commentary on present DFL Party leadership (Brian Melendez and Donna Cassutt), but, yike, that damned job is almost as thankless as as that of school board member. And now, the DFL, such as it is, has “lost” the legislative majorities it enjoyed for one hell of a lot of years.
The Minnesota DFL party is as divided as the country and almost any chair would be forced to sublimate his or her personal politics and passions to mediate the warring factions within, never winning one over one faction or issue only to face another with no appreciation from any of the parties involved. Herding cats is an easy enough term that definitely applies here.
Interestingly, at this age, I generally feel wise enough, and saturated enough with party and political history, facts (not the figures) and personal experience to understand the job confronting the warped political system we’re under; but, for all their bluster, the power of political parties has essentially vanished, victims of egocentric (egomaniacal?) candidates, campaigns, incumbents and caucuses with conflicting platforms and planks, not to mention long-ago legislation that decimated their power to raise the big bucks for their endorsed candidates and their legislative caucuses.
Such is the party machinery and the laws that allow open primaries and an almost limitless flow of dollars that quadrennial conventions are little more than dog-and-pony shows where the party faithful line up against anyone who will not swear to hand over their first-born to this party for its endorsement and disappear when they their bid is refused when the real battles are fought in television commercials between endorsed candidates and those who say, “I love you all, but you’re less than 1% of the people who vote in this state or district, so, while I’d love to have your endorsement, I’m nevertheless taking this campaign to the people.”
That statement alone is proof that while the faithful conventioneers want to believe otherwise, their threats to ignore the worthiness of the candidates and/or the electability of such candidates automatically disqualify them fall on deaf ears, and, smiling all the way out the convention doors, proceed to spend millions to win the primary.
The power of the party thus diminished even further that, instead of reforming its processes and procedures to present primary voters with a cluster of vetted and qualified candidates that it could claim as its own, one of which will emerge as the party’s nominee, the party’s nominee is more often not the one the convention wanted, primarily because the candidate never promised to “abide” by the process and go quietly into that dark night if they lost the endorsement.
Now, that endorsement has become an embarrassment, made worse by the need for the party must again go, hat in hand, to its previously spurned nominee and beg them to accept the endorsement post-primary. It’s happened so often over the last 30 years that challengers to endorsed candidates have won their primary, you’d think someone would have organized a movement to get the party to respond to political realities and stop with the self-destructive pride that infects them at the moment.
When challengers to the endorsee win, it weakens both the party and it’s new nominee (witness the Humphrey after his winning challenge to Mike Freeman only to face Norm Coleman and Jesse Ventura. Of course,other campaign management issue came into play in that race, not to mention the prevailing public mood that made Jesse a “why not try this guy” hero of independents). Would Freeman have won that race?
Who’s to know? Both Freeman and Humphrey were golden political names in DFL history. (I was there that year, co-managing Carol Johnson’s campaign for State Treasurer, which she took to the people after convention feminists blew her off for another, less formidable candidate.)
Who would want to run a party like this? Who would want to set up the year’s caucuses, help draft a platform, argue over its planks and pass kit without debate only see every candidate endorsed and elected under it completely ignore it for their own political survival. Who would want to have to change stripes half the time when people they had originally spurned are now the nominees they must sell with equal enthusiasm?
It hasn’t helped that the country’s real powers – political and legal – have gone after the entire system of political parties in this country – in reverse of the way parliamentary systems revere them. And that’s what we’re missing in this country and its subdivisions: a multi-party parliamentary system truly representing the diverse positions of the electorate rather than honoring only candidates who now run the show. In effect we have 201 parties in the legislature and 535 parties in Congress. Every officeholder is a party in his or her own right – absolutely no ideological or organized discipline – or message. And they like it like this.
If the parties raised the money and not the candidates, they’d not be so easily bought off as individual officeholders, less beholden to the corporations that now buy them.
A party chair can’t cope with such a renegade system, but they take the crap when their party loses the voting majority(ies). The chair becomes a tool of the caucus, not part of it, not the messenger of the convention’s resolutions – more of a minion than a leader and that’s no good.
There’s more, much more about the dysfunction of this state’s party and political system we’ll talk about periodically, but count me out of the actually work to reform it. Too much anger and vilification over the changes this would represent.
Thanks again for the vote of confidence, but I would disappoint just about everyone.
No power, no deal.
