Who is beholden to whom?

Saturday, October 31, 2015

I hate political endorsements.

Mostly they have nothing to do with the candidates, and everything to do with the people doing the endorsements.

This is particularly true when politicians, unions and other prominent citizens wade into the middle of this race or that.

In most cases, a politician who endorses is usually sending a message to his or her following that this or that candidate can be trusted “to do the right thing,” and by “right thing,” he or she means the candidate will do what the politician wants.

Unions have the same philosophy. A union endorsement has nothing to do with a candidate’s ability to do a job in office, but on what side a candidate will stand when it comes to negotiating contracts or other issues the union finds attractive.

This is why I tend to vote for people who do not have a lot of endorsements, and yet seem uniquely qualified to actually perform the job they are running for.

This is particularly true in school board elections, where I want a candidate to be sympathetic to teachers, but someone who isn’t going to sell out the school district simply because he or she feels beholden due to a union endorsement.

This is even truer when it comes to political heavy weights wading into the middle of a school election, blurring the line between separation of power.

Since I live in Jersey City, I have very few choices in the election since at least three of the four candidates are so heavily weighted down with endorsements from politicians, unions and even developers.

So turned off am I by the endorsements, I’ll most likely vote for the one candidate without any.

In Bayonne – where I cannot vote – the matter is more complex, partly because there are so many more candidates running for a number of different terms of office.

Most people expected the mayor to refrain from endorsing any candidate, so that there was significant disappointment when he did. This is partly due to the fact that most the candidates running supported his election two years ago.

The union endorsement is even more confusing. The union issued a questionnaire to determine who they would support – looking for candidate positions on things such as Core curriculum and testing, issues more relevant to teachers and potential employment evaluations than actually educating kids. While I mostly agree with teachers on both, I have a problem with unions stacking the board with pro union board members when the community foots the bill.

Some candidates posted their answers on line, and candidates such as Gina Garofalo-Irizarry seemed to show sympathy for union and teachers’ concerns without completely promising to sell out the school district to give the unions what they wanted.

A teacher, herself, she seemed to understand the issues better than most of the candidates I saw, and appears to be running to actually do the job. Some of the other candidates running in Bayonne are so slick with their campaigns, you’d think they were running in the Presidential primary, spending a small fortune on campaign literature as to raise a question as to why they need to spend so much for what is one of the most thankless jobs in government. School trustees put in long hours and often get grief for their efforts.

So you have to wonder if the slickest campaigns are really designed for higher office later on, and that candidates who spend a lot are looking perhaps for a slot on the city council in the future.

I have a lot of friends in the Bayonne school board race, people I trust, and believe are there for the right reasons. In most cases, these are people failed to get the endorsement of mayor or union, such as Garofalo-Irizarry, and yet seem to be more qualified in most cases than the people with the endorsements.

In Jersey City, I’ll be voting for “the other Gina,” and knowing that if I was in Bayonne, I would be voting with the same aim at having someone who is beholden to parents and the public, and not those who gave endorsements.

But then, I always go with the underdog, just like I am with The Mets in The World Series, hoping against hope that the best candidate actually wins.