When Political Parties Play Politics

Political Parties play politics to their own detriment.  Those volunteers who become active in party politics need to ensure that the party functions according to the principles the party purports to embrace. They would operate under rules that support participation of the volunteers who show up to help.

Current Problems

What occurs instead is that the party organization is controlled by elected officials and their special interests. They work to control the party officers to do their bidding.

These elected officials also enlist special interests to ensure that threats to their elective office are removed.

The result of all of this control is that all volunteers who are not part of this clique are not given a voice when it comes to rules, following rules and making decisions.  Instead, the party functions in a charade. 

The elected officials controlling the county parties try to ensure that the party functions on the basis of blind faith, friendship and loyalty to a clearly corrupt organization. 

When party meetings and conventions are planned with serial speeches by elected officials and no time to do the convention’s business of voting for rules and party officers, you know it’s a rigged convention.  

The result is that smart working party members feel manipulated and turnover is high. What is left is a small cadre of frustrated members and reformation is not achieved.

Unless county party organizations operate with principles, the party organization dies.

Political Clique Dynamics

Elected officials at the city, county and state level continually work together. They also work with the Chamber of Commerce, Community Improvement Districts, Regional Planning Offices and developers and builders. They all seek good working relationships.  It’s a natural clique like you would find in a workforce. They look to these relationships for support, especially elected officials. Challengers are always attacked. The group prefers to control who they deal with and resent meddlesome voters or primary challengers. If corruption infects the group, they are all infected.

Current law reflects a trend toward less voter control over taxes, borrowing, bond issues, projects and spending because of federal bribes and state complicity. Voters object to the waste of low priority, over-expensive projects required by federal grants, so politicians write laws that don’t require voters to vote on these projects. 

When they do allow a vote, they make sure that there are city bribes in the county projects. These city councils and their chambers of commerce become the cheerleaders to vote for the SPLOST or Bond issue.       

The Clean-up Plan

We need to start to clean up the county party organizations. If parties held a series of meetings to review rules and needs and offered broad participation, they could create a set of rules that empowers members.  They would have a hand in crafting simple rules that are difficult to corrupt.  The Party County Chair becomes the facilitator of the meetings and rules are voted on by the members.  The County Chair becomes the chief enforcer of the rules (as written). Plans are developed by the members and voted on by the members. These should include open meetings where registered voters are invited to participate.  This is a volunteer organization and needs to continually recruit potential active members.  It is also a political organization and should be proactive in gathering voter input.

Choosing a Party

Most voters take their cues from family. Most families have distinct political beliefs, so children are raised to be Republicans or Democrats. At some point these children may do some research and confirm their beliefs and remain with the “family party” or change them and move to the other party.

The party you choose should be based on its platform and resolutions and should be in close alignment with your own beliefs.

Ideology

Democrats range from “feed the poor” Liberals to avowed Communists. This is a “big government” socialist party.

Republicans range from Constitutional Conservatives who would work to remove unconstitutional federal powers to save the free market to “big government” internationalists. The Platform and Resolutions are Constitutionalist, but most of the elected officials and central committee are “big government” internationalists.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader