CUSD Mail

As you might guess, not all our mail contains glowing reviews. We took some criticism over our post about machine politics and the Claremont 400's machine backing Claremont Unified School District Board of Education candidate Hilary LaConte.

Well, a reader we respect sent in a comment about the post and questioned our reasoning:

Hi Buzz -

When you say that someone like Hilary LaConte is "underqualified," do you mean underqualified for the school board, or underqualified compared to the other two candidates? Or, I suppose, both?

If you mean the former, you can complain all you want -- but she has chosen to run for the position. You have qualifications. Did you file your papers?

The only fair argument is the latter one: she must be considered only in the context of her qualifications compared to the other two. What are the qualifications of all three candidates who have thrown their hats in? How do they compare?

You could lament the fact that someone else with better qualifications hasn't chosen to run. That would also be fair. One could take the argument that more often than not in elections (local,state, national), those with the best credentials for the job do not have the personality, interest, or drive to run for office. Said differently,those who enter into politics and run for office are often, as a group, rather underqualified.

They are, however, the ones on the ballot, and we should vote for the one we think will do the best job.

Really, the point of our post was that in our view this Claremont 400 machine and the way in which they chose candidates diminishes the end result. Because they are able to control a large pool of votes (mostly in the Claremont Village), they are able to simply name a candidate - no matter the qualifications - and get that person elected.

It's not a matter of the person deciding to run so much as it a matter of candidates paying their dues within the machine to earn the right to get picked to run for an office or get named to a commission.

Hilary LaConte could never have run on her own. She had to have the backing of the machine. The Claremont 400 discourages more qualified candidates because someone with their own way of thinking would be too independent for the 400 to back. And without that backing, the likelihood of winning has traditionally been nil, especially in school board races where turnout is minuscule.

Our point was that the 400 could just choose to run a monkey (or Xavier Alvarez for that matter) for school board and have that unqualified candidate win.

LaConte is probably a perfectly nice person, but that doesn't mean she's the best person available or even the best person running. But she will probably get the most votes because of her backing - the same type of backing, by the way, that was resulted in the questionable goings on in City Hall these days.

Besides, by all accounts, the other two CUSD board candidates, Elizabeth Bingham and Barbara Miller are equally nice people, and all three seem pretty closely in agreement on the issues. That leaves us with only their qualifications separating them.

To that end, we'll try do a comparison of those qualifications in the near future - without commentary - and post those. We plan on using each candidate's own campaign material so that you have their own words, not our interpretation, and we leave the evaluation up to you.

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Getting back to the niceness issue, another reader wrote in to say:

I like your work quite a bit but will say without reservation that you are wrong when you opine that Hilary LaConte has a" lack of competence". Hilary came up through CUSD schools to teach at her alma mater, Vista del Valle, not by any measure a hothouse for the mythical 400. She is not only competent but also dillgent and passionate, as much a student of CUSD, its strengths and its weaknesses, as anyone. She is in fact an ideal candidate, and like any will have to endure a steep learning curve in this thankless job, but as past is prologue, she'll come through swimmingly.

BTW: I have been trying to figure who the 400 are and, as best I can calculate, a more useful figure that better approximates our political complexity and voting reality would be to add a decimal place. The 400 is perhaps flattering to those who deem themselves among the elect, but to my lights when you count up who counts, its closer to 4000 tightly networked and generally good people.

Keep up the brilliant work; I find myself reading your blog more than the LA times!

Thanks for the kind words, dear reader, but we respectfully disagree on several points. First, the fact that LaConte is a product of Claremont schools is not necessarily a recommendation in and of itself. Our contention has been that the governing bodies in town have suffered too much ideological inbreeding. The echo chamber effect is in full force, and that is not a good thing, as anyone at the CGU's Drucker School of Management could tell us. If anything, LaConte is all too susceptible to the groupthink mentality.

Second, we really doubt there are 4,000 tightly networked people deciding these things. There's probably 50-75 people who are the ideological gatekeepers, and they simply tell the Village residents and the retirees at Pilgrim Place and the Claremont Manor how to vote. That's what turns the elections, especially one in which there's a 25-percent or worse turnout.

As for LaConte, the fact that she was a co-chair of Councilmember Linda Elderkin's March, 2007, campaign speaks for itself. She would not have been given that position if she hadn't been well-ensconced as a 400 member, and if she weren't positioning herself to run for CUSD board.

Lastly, we don't doubt that LaConte or any of the other 400 members are good people individually. But we also believe that collectively their actions are less than good, that the aggregate is is far less than sum of the individual components.

This is why all of the disasters we have enumerated before have happened. The collective believes so completely in its infallibility that it cannot conceive of being wrong. No good can come of this kind of exclusive thinking.

And no good will come of it in the future.