Six staffers on Sen. Rick Santorum’s campaign – including an intern who tailed Democratic candidate Bob Casey Jr. in a duck costume – collected voter signatures to help place the Green Party on the fall ballot.
The intern, petitions show, collected signatures from voters in five counties in one day.
Examples such as the apparent one-person, five-county petition tour – plus unregistered voters, multiple signatures by the same person, and fake names – that could form the basis of a challenge, Rooney said. John Michael Glick – the Santorum intern who has worn a duck costume to hound Casey for “ducking” issues – appeared to have collected signatures in Beaver, Washington, Fayette, Juniata, and Schuylkill Counties, Rooney said.
“It’s un-ducking-believable,” he said. “Instead of his duck attire, one has to ask if he wore a Superman costume that day.”
All Green candidate Carl Romanelli had to do was loudly say, thanks for the money, even if it did come from supporters of an extreme right wing senator, then denounce Santorum, and detail what the Green Party is about. He could have done the whole thing in 2-3 sentences and given the media focus he briefly had, those comments would have gone nationwide. But instead he mumbled golly shucks, I guess the Republicans respect my views. No they don’t, Carl. They loathe your views. Lord, what a politically inept dimbulb.
[tags]Carl Romanelli[/tags]
Once again, do you know anything of Carl Romanelli’s circumstances? I would rather doubt that Carl Romanelli is making such comments because he actually believes them. Rather, I suspect that the “Pennsylvania Green Party,” as a whole, is about twenty people in a room (which is what the Ohio Green Party was ten years ago). In short, Carl Romanelli supports the Republican efforts to get him on the ballot because, in realistic terms, he has no organization, no money, and barely any other allies. So it’s not as if he can afford to piss on what is practically his only real support.
Have you yourself ever tried to run a Green Party campaign on those terms?
Meaningfully, the “Green Party” outside of the states of California, New York, and perhaps Illinois is a Potemkin village. In many of those states there is practically nothing there. Someone like Carl Romanelli, who is doubtless fighting incredible odds to establish a Pennsylvania Green Party, is starting from scratch.
Your motivation in slamming Carl Romanelli, on the other hand, is a puzzle to me. Would you care to add something as regards this? Are you a Casey partisan?
I was co-co of the Green Party of LA County from about 2001-2003, have helped on a number of campaigns, and am webmaster for Bill Paparian, a Green running for Congress in Pasadena (paparian4congress.com.)
However, I’m not a Green anymore. Started going to ANSWER Coalition meetings while co-co. Golly, instead of 3-4 hour council meetings filled with anger where nothing ever got done, I found ANSWER meetings were friendly, short, and then we went out and actually did stuff. That’s when I left the GP.
Next Sat. ANSWER will do simultaneous anti-war demos in DC, SF, and LA, and we have little money and no vast resources either. But we are organized.
The GP at all levels is a poster child for disfunction. I’m blogged a lot about this, it’s a combination of a consensus system that doesn’t work and decentralization taken to an absurd degree. Organizing Greens is like herding cats. Plus there’s this bizarre air of sanctity that Greens too often have, we are noble and pure and thus should be exempt from criticism.
Romanelli could and should have pissed on his “support” after getting ballot status. Because it’s not support at all, just a ploy by the extreme right. He should have said that. And didn’t.
I find it baffling that Greens are surprised that Romanelli is being attacked for taking funding from the religious right. Why shouldn’t he be?
mr m:
this sez it all
if i was able to do links
i would link this line back to” stop me…”
i did however
copy it into a comment panel there
but only father smiff has linking skills
i’m supposed to be
a semi funtional literate numerate
“add on”
but i remain stubbornly
a digtal universe nit wit
and with adhd to boot
i shall visit here for sure
I see. Is ANSWER running a candidate against Santorum and Casey?
ANSWER sees people in the streets as the primary way to ignite, then force change. Peter Camejo would agree, read his Avocado Declaration.
The GP is in trouble, in large part, because the structure of the party makes effective organizing almost impossible. The consensus system means things drag on endlessly and those who know how to game the system will. Internal GP politics is too often a poisonous rat nest of squabbling going back for years, something that is certainly true, from my direct knowledge, of LA County, the State of California party, and the National party. These are internal problems and block the GP from being effective.
My view. The GP got jacked on the right by the David Cobbs in 2004, and now is getting jacked on the left by ISO. What remains may soon be an empty husk. Would it be that it were different…
I got tired of endless and contentious GP meetings where nothing got accomplished. In ANSWER we get stuff done. Plus, it’s fun (if exhausting.)
1) The GP got jacked on the right by the David Cobbs in 2004, and now is getting jacked on the left by ISO. So what should we do? Should we quit the Green Party? How would that help?
2) ANSWER sees people in the streets as the primary way to ignite, then force change. But all the people in the streets in 2003 did not stop the war against Iraq. And the Democratic Party was more effective in 2004 in keeping people OUT of the streets than ANSWER has been in keeping them IN the streets. These two phenomena would seem to disconfirm the “people in the streets” strategy.
What would confirm this strategy at a later date?
And can we really say that partisan, electoral politics has NOTHING to do with stopping the war against Iraq?
3) Should Pennsylvania have a Green Party at all? This thread is about Carl Romanelli, who is trying to run as a Green in Pennsylvania.
Many, of the problems the GP faces are of their own making. Lots of other groups manage with limited resources and money. The GP doesn’t, in fact the party is disintegrating, a process that will continue unless serious internal reforms happen.
Read the Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. She details precisely why groups organized like the GP are doomed to ineptness. It’s not the dedication of the members, it’s the internal structures (or fact of them) that are the root of the problem.
Dear Bob,
With all due respect for your great blog — it would be awfully nice if you were to answer my questions as I’ve written them. I already know quite well how the Green Party is in a trouble of its own making. Take your time — no hurry…
Since this is a blog from LA, and not PA, I’ll use this opportunity to tell you all that the LA Greens are hosting a big Party for Peace.
Music/Comedy/Raffle/Kids/Dancing and meet 5 Green Party candidates for peace from the LA area–
Byron DeLear and Bill Paparian for Congress, Peter Thottam and Ricardo Costa for State Assembly and Donna J. Warren for Lt. Governor
in Culver City, Sat. Aug 19, 3-8pm.
download a flyer from our website
http://losangelesgreens.org/
Well, the National Green Party did counter with a press release on Aug. 4.
Greens Defend PA Candidate for US Senate Against Democrat Slurs
http://gp.org/press/pr_2006_08_04.shtml
Having worked on many grassroots Green Party campaigns myself, I surmise that Romanelli didn’t have a high-powered PR staff on board to help when his brief window of media hit.
Was he prepared? Could he have responded better? Sure.
In general, about not taking money from individuals who appear not to share our values: how long is the time period for a person to have changed their values? For instance, I know many Republicans who are active in the Green Party now. Do we have to wait 1 year, or 2,or 5, for them to prove themselves?
Lisa Taylor
LA Greens
I’d like to point you to a rebuttal by Marakay Rogers, Green candidate for governor in Pennsylvania (published on http://appalachiangreens.blogspot.com/2006/08/response-to-charges-against-carl.html). For my own part, I’d like to say that the notion of a “spoiler” is patently offensive: it implies that Green voters don’t know their own minds, and would be voting for Bob Casey if only someone could constrain our ballot choices in PA. Behind Casey’s objections to the Romanelli campaign lies a supreme sense of entitlement, of exactly the sort that minor parties want to root out of U.S. politics. Below are Marakay’s comments:
1) The Luzerne County GP organized itself as a federal PAC and acted on its own in this. The state GP has had no involvement with Carl Romanelli’s campaign and neither it nor my campaign have used any of Carl’s money which was earmarked entirely for a federal campaign and must be used as such.
2) The GPPA and I don’t know where Carl’s money came from, it’s his campaign that collected it. Now, obviously, people from any party can donate to any other party; Greens all know that. When I ran for Attorney General in 2004 I received donations from Reform Party, Democratic Party, and Republican Party members, and I was the endorsed Reform Party candidate as well as the Green Party candidate (I am also the Reform candidate for governor this year as well as the Green candidate).
3) The Philadelphia Inquirer, which claims to have “discovered” this information, is known in PA as a giant shill for Democrat US Senate candidate Bob Casey, who is just as anti-choice and pro-war as is incumbent Rick Santorum. Casey ran his progressive Dem opponents into the ground during the primaries and is now trying to do the same by whatever means possible to his Green opponent.
4) Carl, Greenly, has taken no corporate money. I see nothing wrong, however, with bleeding the rich. Regardless of party.
5) If you check the lists of Casey’s and Santorum’s major contributors, they’re heavily duplicated. Both have received millions of dollars this year from the same handful of people and corporations. I haven’t checked about these donors, who knows but that they’re trying to cover their bases with anyone who gets elected? I haven’t heard Casey deny that he’s taken money from the same people who contributed to Carl.
6) Is there some requirement I’ve never seen that we ask donors to identify their party of registration and their intent in donating? If there is, I don’t know of it, the FEC doesn’t know of it and the state elections committee doesn’t know of it.
7) You can’t run a campaign, especially in a year where Carl needed 100,000 signatures collected to give him a chance to have enough valid sigs to get on PA’s ballot under our oppressive ballot access law (about which I have filed my own federal lawsuit this year) without spending mass quantities of time and money in travel, in deploying volunteers, in copying, in postage, in PR generation, and the like. This is just to get on the ballot in PA and not to “campaign” for votes afterwards. Wherever Carl’s money came from, he’s used it wisely and Greenly.
8) NO ONE in Pennsylvania has been a louder or prouder opponent of Rick Santorum for the past 6 years than has Carl Romanelli. If Rick Santorum’s people helped Carl they helped a man known to loathe their candidate and everything he stands for — Santorum is anti-woman, anti-LGBT, “anti-terrorist”(= anti-Arab), pro-war, pro-“Homeland Security”. Carl has denounced him publicly and called him on the carpet for public debate on these and other matters.
If Republicans have given Carl money they have done so at the expense, in my opinion, of their own candidate. Carl is a respected businessman and former government employee here in PA, an excellent speaker and debater, and an active Green on the national and international scene. The Republicans who donated to Carl had nothing to lose but the Republican agenda by supporting him.
9) See also http://www.ydr.com/politics/ci_4130183