The El Paso Times Editorial Board got it half-right on Sunday. Their editorial piece’s main thesis was that the leadership of El Paso Democratic Party let us all down at the convention.
For the most part, I’d agree. However, it is in the specific names mentioned in the piece that is where El Paso Times Editorial Board got it wrong. The leadership spoken of was the Democratic Party heavy-hitters of elected officials, Silvestre Reyes, Eliot Shapleigh, and Norma Chavez.
Could they have taken a stronger role and set a better example for the rest of the party, maybe.
But the Times’ piece does the same thing that a lot of people around town are doing right now. They are making the cast of characters involved the story and not the issue, which is the violation of party rules.
The easy way out is to point to the elected officials and blame them, but the responsible thing to do is the cover the actual issue at hand. I realize it’s an editorial piece, but their disappointment should be in the fact that the process wasn’t followed properly. The fact that the Democratic Party has probably squandered the most positive shot in the arm the Party has seen since they lowered the voting age.
If the Times’ Editorial Board wants to name names, they should at least discuss the right people. The simple fact is that neither Reyes, Shapleigh, nor Chavez were in a position to affect the out-come of the convention. That responsibility fell to these individuals: Danny Anchondo (County Chair), Ken Sutherland (Nominations Committee Chair), and Albert Alvidrez (Credentials Committee Chair).
These gentlemen and they alone, were the Democratic Party leaders that were in any type of position to affect the outcome of the convention. All three gentlemen were Hillary supporters. Sutherland has stated that the reason he decided to make it a 9-1 delegate split was because he felt that there were issues not resolved in Credentials Committee that would have went favorably for the Hillary camp. So, taking one word from the rule, fair, and untethering it from the rest of the rule, Mr. Sutherland moved to adjudicate that issue from Credentials Committee in his Nominations Committee. There is no rule within the Democratic Party that grants the Chair of one committee the independent authority to adjudicate an issue from another committee. Mr. Anchondo allowed Mr. Sutherland to go forward with they way he dealt the delegates. Reyes, Shapleigh, and Chavez were not in a position to do anything about it.
If we were able to divorce ourselves from our presidential preferences for a few moments and really analyzed the issue at hand, it seems to me that the objective individual would come to the conclusion that rules were broken at the convention.
The El Paso Times got that much right, but got the names of the responsible individuals wrong and we are all best served when the appropriate individuals are discussed within the context of the actual issue. Jaime Abeytia has a blog at http://lionstar75.wordpress.com/
