All Politics Is/Are Local
This November I will vote for the first time in my new location, the Town of Marbletown in Ulster County, New York. Paying close attention as I do to the political scene in any community I join, I have learned that politicians around these parts manifest an inclination new to me: They feel free to party-hop.
More precisely, some of them will run on the line of whatever party will have them. This doesn’t equate to the not-uncommon situation of a candidate from one party receiving an endorsement from another party, and thus appearing on both party lines on the ballot. It involves actually becoming, say, a Democratic Party candidate if the local Republican Party won’t have you, or vice versa. To put it bluntly, using any means necessary to get elected and on the government payroll.
Here’s how a July 6, 2023 editorial in one of our local newspapers, the Shawangunk Journal, puts it (approvingly):
Vote for People, Not Parties
Rich Parete
… Most of our judicial candidates run on all party lines each year — Republican, Conservative, Democratic, and sometimes even the Working Families line. In fact, some candidates freely jump from party to party if they lose one nomination. Take the 2021 supervisor race in Rochester, where former Democrat and town councilmember Bea Haugen-Depuy ran against incumbent Mike Baden on the Republican and Conservative lines after losing the Democratic Primary nomination.
The same happened in Marbletown in 2021 after the local Democratic Party opted to not endorse Supervisor Rich Parete. So he just switched to the Republican Party. …
Party lines at the local level don’t say much about who the candidate really is or what they stand for. …
Presumably, by this measure, so long as these elected officials — like small-town Mussolinis — make the trains run on time and fix the potholes, the voters should ignore not only the larger implications of their party allegiances but also the amorality of their fungible commitments thereto. Nevermind that when Kyrsten Sinema left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent it signified betrayal on the deepest level. Or that, in my personal life, learning that a close friend had gone down the MAGA rabbithole would qualify as a big effing deal. Locally, according to these people, it’s on a par with seasonal shifts in hemlines. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.
In 1947, author Lillian Hellman took a principled position when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC): “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” Our area pols apparently take a more cynical page from Steely Dan. To paraphrase: “Any party that I’m welcome to is better than the one I come from.”
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In response to this peculiar situation, I wrote the following letter to the editor of the Shawangunk Journal, published there on August 24, 2023. It’s behind a paywall, so here’s the text:
The Fish Rots All the Way to the Tail
I read with great amusement Paul Tuzzolino’s heartfelt plea, “It Is Not About Party” (August 10, 2023).
Easy to understand why any Republican up for re-election — even a relatively lowly Wawarsing Councilman like Tuzzolino — would want to establish as much distance as possible from the Republican Party right now. After all, the GOP’s leading contender for the 2024 nomination faces 91 indictments (and counting) in four state and federal criminal cases (and counting).
Donald Trump mugshot, Fulton County Jail, Atlanta, GA, 8-24-23
Certainly through this November, and just as certainly through November 2024, the nightly news will headline the failed coup of the insurrectionist GOP and the malfeasance of the Trump crime family. The MAGA-cultist faction of the GOP has already begun doxxing the judges and jurors in those cases.
On the national level, the GOP requires loyalty pledges from its presidential candidates, most of whom have already committed themselves to pardoning Trump and others in their theocratic-fascist conspiracy. On the state level, they’re stripping books from library shelves, firing teachers for embracing diversity, and doing everything they can to prevent young people, people of color, and others from voting Democratic.
Tuzzolino takes issue with a previous letter writer’s assertion that “While many local candidates might not run on a specific agenda, the political party that they are aligned with certainly has one!” Surely he jests. By definition, political parties have agendas. By definition, those who run for election under the banner of any party do so to endorse and further those agendas. By definition, those who vote for representatives from a given party support those party agendas.
It’s been that way since ancient Greece. Tuzzolino’s objection doesn’t even qualify as gaslighting. It’s childish nonsense.
Tuzzolino claims to be “fiercely independent.” However, given his party affiliation, and his chosen party’s fealty to the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted convicted rapist, and the variety of fierce independence his Republican cohorts display, we have a right to demand that he put a finer point on his self-congratulatory assertion.
To wit: Is he as fiercely independent as, say, Josh Hawley? As Mitt Romney? As Lauren Boebert? As Chris Christie? As Jim Jordan? As Marjorie Taylor Greene? As Mike Pence? As Ron DeSantis? As Liz Cheney? As Rand Paul? As Tim Scott? As Paul Gosar? As Matt Gaetz?
So many varieties of “fierce independence” — the GOP is just one big tent, innit!
Notably, in the 738 words of his apologia Tuzzolino can’t bring himself to say a single word about Donald Trump, the Big Lie of voter fraud, the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 election, or the ongoing Republican Party effort to undermine our democracy by challenging election results in state after state. Not to mention the frequent Republican claims that Democrats are communist/socialist globalist Satanist pedophile groomers who drink children’s blood.
Not. One. Single. Word.
There is no daylight between Donald Trump and the Republican Party. By Tuzzolino’s own choice, there is no daylight between him and the Republican Party, which he’s not “fiercely independent” enough to criticize, much less renounce.
Whining that it’s so unfair that anyone could take his party affiliation into account when deciding how to vote is typically Republican nowadays — panic masquerading as self-righteousness. You can smell the flop sweat.
— A. D. Coleman
Marbletown
(Note: “The Shawangunk Ridge, also known as the Shawangunk Mountains or The Gunks, is a ridge of bedrock in Ulster County, Sullivan County and Orange County in the state of New York, extending from the northernmost point of the border with New Jersey to the Catskills.” — Wikipedia. Hence the newspaper’s name.)
•
This post sponsored in part by a donation from George Malave.
•
Special offer: If you want me to either continue pursuing a particular subject or give you a break and (for one post) write on a topic — my choice — other than the current main story, make a donation of $50 via the PayPal widget below, indicating your preference in a note accompanying your donation. I’ll credit you as that new post’s sponsor, and link to a website of your choosing.
And, as a bonus, I’ll send you a signed copy of my new book, poetic license / poetic justice — published under my full name, Allan Douglass Coleman, which I use for my creative writing.
SPJ Research Award 2014
Straight Outta Stone Ridge: The Fish Rots All the Way to the Tail
This November I will vote for the first time in my new location, the Town of Marbletown in Ulster County, New York. Paying close attention as I do to the political scene in any community I join, I have learned that politicians around these parts manifest an inclination new to me: They feel free to party-hop.
More precisely, some of them will run on the line of whatever party will have them. This doesn’t equate to the not-uncommon situation of a candidate from one party receiving an endorsement from another party, and thus appearing on both party lines on the ballot. It involves actually becoming, say, a Democratic Party candidate if the local Republican Party won’t have you, or vice versa. To put it bluntly, using any means necessary to get elected and on the government payroll.
Here’s how a July 6, 2023 editorial in one of our local newspapers, the Shawangunk Journal, puts it (approvingly):
Vote for People, Not Parties
Rich Parete
… Most of our judicial candidates run on all party lines each year — Republican, Conservative, Democratic, and sometimes even the Working Families line. In fact, some candidates freely jump from party to party if they lose one nomination. Take the 2021 supervisor race in Rochester, where former Democrat and town councilmember Bea Haugen-Depuy ran against incumbent Mike Baden on the Republican and Conservative lines after losing the Democratic Primary nomination.
The same happened in Marbletown in 2021 after the local Democratic Party opted to not endorse Supervisor Rich Parete. So he just switched to the Republican Party. …
Party lines at the local level don’t say much about who the candidate really is or what they stand for. …
Presumably, by this measure, so long as these elected officials — like small-town Mussolinis — make the trains run on time and fix the potholes, the voters should ignore not only the larger implications of their party allegiances but also the amorality of their fungible commitments thereto. Nevermind that when Kyrsten Sinema left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent it signified betrayal on the deepest level. Or that, in my personal life, learning that a close friend had gone down the MAGA rabbithole would qualify as a big effing deal. Locally, according to these people, it’s on a par with seasonal shifts in hemlines. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.
In 1947, author Lillian Hellman took a principled position when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC): “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” Our area pols apparently take a more cynical page from Steely Dan. To paraphrase: “Any party that I’m welcome to is better than the one I come from.”
•
In response to this peculiar situation, I wrote the following letter to the editor of the Shawangunk Journal, published there on August 24, 2023. It’s behind a paywall, so here’s the text:
The Fish Rots All the Way to the Tail
I read with great amusement Paul Tuzzolino’s heartfelt plea, “It Is Not About Party” (August 10, 2023).
Easy to understand why any Republican up for re-election — even a relatively lowly Wawarsing Councilman like Tuzzolino — would want to establish as much distance as possible from the Republican Party right now. After all, the GOP’s leading contender for the 2024 nomination faces 91 indictments (and counting) in four state and federal criminal cases (and counting).
Donald Trump mugshot, Fulton County Jail, Atlanta, GA, 8-24-23
Certainly through this November, and just as certainly through November 2024, the nightly news will headline the failed coup of the insurrectionist GOP and the malfeasance of the Trump crime family. The MAGA-cultist faction of the GOP has already begun doxxing the judges and jurors in those cases.
On the national level, the GOP requires loyalty pledges from its presidential candidates, most of whom have already committed themselves to pardoning Trump and others in their theocratic-fascist conspiracy. On the state level, they’re stripping books from library shelves, firing teachers for embracing diversity, and doing everything they can to prevent young people, people of color, and others from voting Democratic.
Tuzzolino takes issue with a previous letter writer’s assertion that “While many local candidates might not run on a specific agenda, the political party that they are aligned with certainly has one!” Surely he jests. By definition, political parties have agendas. By definition, those who run for election under the banner of any party do so to endorse and further those agendas. By definition, those who vote for representatives from a given party support those party agendas.
It’s been that way since ancient Greece. Tuzzolino’s objection doesn’t even qualify as gaslighting. It’s childish nonsense.
Tuzzolino claims to be “fiercely independent.” However, given his party affiliation, and his chosen party’s fealty to the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted convicted rapist, and the variety of fierce independence his Republican cohorts display, we have a right to demand that he put a finer point on his self-congratulatory assertion.
To wit: Is he as fiercely independent as, say, Josh Hawley? As Mitt Romney? As Lauren Boebert? As Chris Christie? As Jim Jordan? As Marjorie Taylor Greene? As Mike Pence? As Ron DeSantis? As Liz Cheney? As Rand Paul? As Tim Scott? As Paul Gosar? As Matt Gaetz?
So many varieties of “fierce independence” — the GOP is just one big tent, innit!
Notably, in the 738 words of his apologia Tuzzolino can’t bring himself to say a single word about Donald Trump, the Big Lie of voter fraud, the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 election, or the ongoing Republican Party effort to undermine our democracy by challenging election results in state after state. Not to mention the frequent Republican claims that Democrats are communist/socialist globalist Satanist pedophile groomers who drink children’s blood.
Not. One. Single. Word.
There is no daylight between Donald Trump and the Republican Party. By Tuzzolino’s own choice, there is no daylight between him and the Republican Party, which he’s not “fiercely independent” enough to criticize, much less renounce.
Whining that it’s so unfair that anyone could take his party affiliation into account when deciding how to vote is typically Republican nowadays — panic masquerading as self-righteousness. You can smell the flop sweat.
— A. D. Coleman
Marbletown
(Note: “The Shawangunk Ridge, also known as the Shawangunk Mountains or The Gunks, is a ridge of bedrock in Ulster County, Sullivan County and Orange County in the state of New York, extending from the northernmost point of the border with New Jersey to the Catskills.” — Wikipedia. Hence the newspaper’s name.)
•
This post sponsored in part by a donation from George Malave.
•
Special offer: If you want me to either continue pursuing a particular subject or give you a break and (for one post) write on a topic — my choice — other than the current main story, make a donation of $50 via the PayPal widget below, indicating your preference in a note accompanying your donation. I’ll credit you as that new post’s sponsor, and link to a website of your choosing.
And, as a bonus, I’ll send you a signed copy of my new book, poetic license / poetic justice — published under my full name, Allan Douglass Coleman, which I use for my creative writing.