In 1998, the eastern group that was running the State Party decided both to run a full slate of candidates for state office, or as close as could be obtained. They also decided to encourage Party members to run for the state legislature. Candidates were obtained for five of the six statewide offices (no Libertarian attorney would agree to run for Attorney General), and around 20 legislative positions.
For a change, there was some public discussion of the wisdom of pursuing Major Party status. I observed that Major Party status would make it enormously more difficult to put on the ballot all of our other candidates. Furthermore, it was hardly believable that we were going to elect a Governor or Senator, so running Libertarians for those offices was not going to increase the number of elected Libertarians. Nor was a set of campaigns for statewide office likely to put our top-of-ticket candidates into many debates.
If we took the resources that were about to be thrown away on campaigns for statewide office, and invested them in building local party groups and running candidates down-ticket, we would be ahead in the long run. The State Board remained attached to running candidates for statewide office. The minor detail that several current or recent State Board members were to be statewide candidates (Dean Cook—Governor; Eli Israel— Lieutenant Governor; Carla Howell—Auditor) did nothing to reduce their enthusiasm.
We now reach the first bit of friction between the eastern group that ran the State Party and the Pioneer Valley Libertarian Association (PVLA). The Libertarian Association of Massachusetts (LAMA) had a seven-member elected State Board. It also accepted local affiliate groups. Each affiliate, the PVLA being one, was entitled to its own voting representative on the State Board. In early 1998 PVLA representatives came back to our meetings and reported that the State Board had issues with accepting our representatives.
Finally, I went to a State Board meeting myself. When I noted that I was the duly appointed PVLA representative, State Chair Carla Howell said “George, I don’t want to get into that now”, and refused to let me take a seat as the PVLA representative. This meeting marked the last time the PVLA tried to send the representative to which it was entitled to a State Board meeting.
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