Pushing political party control OUTSIDE of the beltway (and beltline) is a good thing

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In a recent column, The N&O’s Rob Christensen bemoaned the fact that state Democrat Party chairman David Parker owed his job more to activists outside Wake County than to the powers-that-be.

 If it were the other way around, The N&O and their comrades in the state party could have made this Jay Parmley thing go away lickety-split. 

It’s kind of like hearing newspaper columnists moan about the influence of ‘idiot bloggers’ and other new media sources.  It really rains on your parade when you realize that (1) there are choices and (2) you are no longer the only game in town. 

One of the biggest problems with our politics is the fact that our elected so-called leaders are more worried about pleasing their caucus leaders than they are pleasing the folks back home.

The editor at Political Hotline was commenting today on Twitter about a comment made to him by folks at US House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s SuperPAC.  Mr. Hotline said Cantor’s people bragged to him that their goal is to choose and fund the “most manageable” candidates in races all over the country.  “Manageable” — for all you folks in Rio Linda — is fancy DC talk to describe someone who does what the bosses in DC tell him or her to do.

I don’t care who you are or what your ideolog ical bent is, or what party you belong to — if you are elected to go to Raleigh or DC, and the bosses describe you as “manageable”,  YOU NEED TO COME HOME NOW.  You are there to do the bidding of your neighbors back home, not that of Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Robin Hayes, Skip Stam, or Thom Tillis.

Far too often, bosses in DC and Raleigh handpick underlings at the local levels to act as middlemen between the ruling class in each capital city and the great unwashed.  We need less of begging for handouts from Raleigh and DC, and more of us telling them what we expect them to do.

The more of the process we push outside of the beltline and beltway, the faster we will accomplish our goal of putting our country back on track.