At the county level, State committee members are screened and nominated for “selection” to run on the party ticket for election. Usually no one runs un-endorsed by the county chairman and his handpicked nomination committee.

So grassroots is a false term. It’s pre-engineered turf management.

Do all county delegations and regional caucuses vote in complete harmony 100% of the time…No, they do not but it’s pretty tightly monitored and controlled by county chairs who have their own closed door session in Harrisburg each State Committee meeting called the County Chair Meeting where NO OTHER RANK AND FILE DEMOCRAT is allowed…even though I understand the State charter for Democrats allows for it.

Regional caucuses sometime will also monitor “grassroots” via sense of the caucus meetings held at State Committee gatherings.

The only pure democracy occurring in the Democratic party is at the voting polls where Democrats can disappear behind a curtain and vote their decisions.

With the State party committee and its leadership, it’s apparatus and machinations for the most part.

People are naive to think otherwise.

Chet-
Livingston is a professor at Rutgers in Jersey. If you take all the actual information in his posts, and put them in a thimble, you’d still have a enough room for your thumb.

Greg-
The Dems are certainly more bottom-up than the monolithic R’s. Though, there are some areas where the Dems are top-down and it’s not to the party’s advantage because it chafes the grassroots people.
You’re argument about Specter vs Toomey is dead-on. Sestak just can’t capture the center from Toomey the way Specter can.

Now as for the candidates – Sen. Specter has always been a moderate and Pat Toomey even called him a “far-left liberal” in 2004. He was a Democrat before and he’s just coming back home. He hasn’t changed all that much and I imagine he’ll still be a moderate who continues to put Pennsylvanians ahead of partisan politics. Pat Toomey was a Wall Street derivatives trader and had a direct hand in the financial crisis in writing part of the legislation that repealed Glass-Steagall protections. His voting record shows that he’s more concerned about his Wall Street buddies than Main Street Americans.

1) Any evidence that “State committees, at least in Pennsylvania, function something like the Supreme Soviet” and “It’s hard to believe things are different on the Democratic side”? Let’s remember that state committee members are elected, not appointed.

2) Sestak is a “progressive Democrat”? I doubt any progressives who oppose the Bush-Obama military buildup and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will think so.

Just something to think about while you are reading the idiotic reasoning of Dave Diano.

Unfortunately it wasn’t that long ago when our state went and elected a far right kook like Santorum. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that one in Toomey could get elected because of voter apathy and short term memory loss about the Republicans being the party that got us into the economic mess we’re in. Toomey is hoping for low voter turnout and to use popular angst to get in, even though he’s basically promising to be a jobs killer in the same way Scott Brown has promised to be one: holding health care reform hostage for political and idealological reasons. Let’s hope there’s a collective wake up call to the people of this state to start to understand how the GOP is looking to hurt our economy through Toomey.

Michael, could we have a rare moment of intellectual honesty from you to address the following:
1) Do you believe (or realize) that Toomey is MORE conservative than Santorum?
2) If you answered #1 honestly, how can you expect the voters to accept Toomey, when they rejected Santorum?

(The correct answer to #2 is: If the voters don’t find out how conservative Toomey is.)