| In light of all the excitement over the "elected delegates" issue and Chris Gabrieli's newly-minted run for Gov, I thought this comment by PatrickA on Charley's post was important enough to put on the front page:
I was at the state committee meeting last night when James Roosevelt (party legal counsel/parliamentarian) explained the discussion that the rules committee had over the language.
Part of the discussion related to the history of changes that had been made to the language. Roosevelt explained those changes and that seemed to satisfy the members of the state committee (who, you must remember, are a mostly pro-Patrick group). As town chairs, ward chairs, and state committee members are all elected, they qualify under this provision. It's not clear whether this provision has ever been used before, so there's not a lot of precedent here.
Basically, John Bonifaz doesn't know what he's talking about, and the rules were never changed.
OK. As I've been saying for months, most of these rules are bullshit, anti-democratic ways to ensure the continued power of the hackocracy. And I think Gabrieli's vanity move to inject himself into the Governor's race is a really bad idea. But let's not get all worked up over something that may well be a non-issue. From the vantage point of someone who wasn't there (i.e., me), PatrickA's version looks perfectly reasonable: there was a question as to how to interpret ambiguous language ("elected convention delegates") in this rule, both possible interpretations were reasonable, a decision was reached, and that decision favored Chris Gabrieli. Was the fix in? Who knows. But it does seem to me that Bonifaz is off-base by claiming that this was a "rule change" rather than an interpretation, and by asserting that the "literal meaning" of the rule is perfectly clear and that the party disregarded that clear meaning, when that doesn't appear to be the case. Bonifaz doesn't do his long-shot campaign any favors by leveling dubious accusations. |
