(Promoted as our policy to front page major statewide office seekers – promoted by GMD)

Thank you, GMD, for posting the recent article about Jim Condos’s and my dust up.  You’ve done all of us — including Jim and me — a service by putting this issue on the table.  One word of criticism: Jim’s and my argument isn’t ugly, it’s valuable democratic (small d) debate.

So what is the debate?  From Jim’s standpoint, it is whether I am a True Democrat or whether I am some sort of political opportunist.  To be clear, I am a True Democrat.  I hold strong, liberal views on social justice issues important to the Democratic Party.  I vote for Democratic candidates for policy offices in accordance with these views.  I contribute to these candidates.  I attend party functions.  I support the Party and its platforms.

But my liberal views have no bearing on or role in the functions of the Secretary of State’s office, which is a service, not a policy, office.

So what is really the debate? From my standpoint, the debate is whether my fellow candidates understand the nonpartisan nature of the Secretary of State’s office.  Let’s turn first to Jason Gibbs.

Jason has taken a recent tack of vigorously attacking Deb Markowitz for minor issues surrounding the delivery of ballots from printers to town offices.  Jason’s sniping, however, tell us more about his partisanship than Deb’s tenure as Secretary of State.

In a nutshell, Jason doesn’t know what he is talking about.  If Jason had any knowledge of how the office worked, he’d know that there are ALWAYS issues with getting the ballots out because of their complicated and technical nature.  For example, Jason’s mentor, Jim Douglas, had number of problems over his tenure with the ballots, misprinting names of candidates (thereby requiring mad dashes by staff to various polling booths), misidentifying candidates’ places of residence, and the costly, wholesale revision of ballots after they had been sent to the printer’s.  In Jim’s case, as in Deb’s, there were no problems with the system, there were just the realities of organizing and distributing roughly 492 different sets of ballots for every primary election on a limited state budget.  

We all know that if Deb were a Republican, or if Douglas were still in that office, Jason would never have mounted attacks because these attacks have nothing to do with an individual’s performance.  Jason is quintessentially partisan and has no business, really, running for the office of Secretary of State.

So what about Jim Condos? Is he as partisan as Jason?  Probably not; but he’s pretty partisan.  Two quick examples relating to Jim:

At Caledonia County  Democratic Party meeting on April 25, Jim and I both spoke for a few minutes. Jim told the crowd that we are on the eve of reapportionment and intimated that we Democrats must make sure to protect our interests. When it was my turn, I criticized Jim’s statements.  A Sec of State candidate has no business — even in the primary — in playing party politics on reapportionment, IRV, single payer health care, or any other policy issue.

At a Franklin County Democratic Party meeting on February 22, in an apparent attempt to downplay the value of having a lawyer in the office of Sec of State, Jim stated: “there’s a legal way to do things and there is a common sense way to do things and sometimes the right way is in the middle.”  As I pointed out to the handful of people at the meeting, that’s just plain wrong. The legal way is the right way. Constitutional officers in particular must adhere to the law.

Over the life of this campaign I’ve spoken to a lot of Democratic Party members about the need to keep the Secretary of State quintessentially non-partisan.  The vast number of the Democratic faithful understand that and would, I am certain, vote for a non partisan Republican over a partisan Democratic, if such a situation arose.  That’s another reason to honor the Democratic party.  Its members put principle ahead of ideology.

What do we want in a Secretary of State?  Isn’t it objectivity, nonpartisanship, reasoned advice?  What party has more of that than another?  The work of the Secretary’s office has nothing to do with parties, and if we saw a Secretary like Katherine Harris favoring one party or the other, wouldn’t we start talking impeachment?