In the one-party city, we'll be needing some human rights assistance.

Speaking politically, one-party states seldom relinquish their monopoly "rights" without a fight.

ON THE AVENUES: One-keg parties rarely work, either.

 ... Obviously, the very notion of a one-party state embraces the concentration of power within one sphere, according to a single set of guidelines, and with avenues of political participation effectively closed apart from reigning orthodoxy. In the absence of palpable opposition, the sole party devotes itself to maintaining its own entrenched bureaucracy, safe in the knowledge that governmental institutions merely mimic the party’s own time-honored levers, and cannot be detached either physically or metaphorically from the entrenched patronage of the party itself.

Or, in other words, much like political life in New Albany.

If you're wondering why an otherwise sensible person like Democratic Party chairman Adam Dickey would comment on social media to the effect that the Party loves and supports all its candidates equally, conveniently ignoring David White's primary election evidence to the contrary, and even after Dan Coffey spent much of 2015 publicly contradicting the Party's platform, behaving as an unreconstructed, homophobic nutcase and regarding Dickey's stewardship with palpable disdain, it's because Coffey is completely unprincipled and therefore useful to the maintenance of a one-party city.

If Jeff Gahan is Vito Corleone and Dickey poses as Tom Hagen, then Coffey serves as Luca Brasi. The only drawback to this analogy is that "The Godfather" was not a product of Walt Disney's studio.

As Dickey publicly whistles tunes from the musical "How to Succeed in Politics Without Really Trying," Coffey can be relied upon to plant stilettos in the backs of opponents, especially those within the Party itself -- like John Gonder, who should remember never to choose a chair facing the door.

Coffey occurs precisely because shift is not intended to happen, and that's why we must be pro-active and contact the Carter Center now.

Do election monitors charge by the hour? We can crowd-source their pay packets.

Checkpoints at cemeteries should do the trick ... right, Adam?

Our Goal

The Carter Center works globally to advance democratic elections and governance consistent with universal human rights.

What do Carter Center election observers do?

Election observers recognized as impartial and credible play a key role in shaping perceptions about the quality and legitimacy of electoral processes. To ensure a meaningful, nonpartisan role for its election observation activities, The Carter Center must be invited by a country's election authorities and welcomed by the major political parties.

Election observation missions start long before election day, with experts and long-term observers analyzing election laws, assessing voter education and registration, and evaluating fairness in campaigns. On election day, observers assess the casting and counting of ballots. In the days and weeks after the election, observers monitor the tabulation process, electoral dispute resolution processes, and the publication of final results.

Read more about our recent observation of elections in Nepal, Madagascar, Kenya, Mozambique, and Tunisia.

ON THE AVENUES: Party time in the trickle-down, one-party city.

ON THE AVENUES: Party time in the trickle-down, one-party city.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

In late July, just prior to commencing my northern holiday, I was walking westbound down Market Street, and stepped from the curb onto 4th Street at the designated crosswalk.

Yes, folks, crosswalks actually exist, and when you park your car or 18-wheeler smack in the middle of one, you’re trespassing on a walker’s legally mandated street space … but I digress.

A vehicle was approaching, traveling southbound, and it's a good thing I was paying attention to it the whole time. Not only did the vehicle fail to make a complete stop, but the driver's eyes remained fixed on the one-way traffic on Market Street approaching him, eastbound.

I never once saw his eyes.

He never once looked in my direction.

Not even once.

Since the vehicle’s window was open, verbal agitprop seemed both appropriate and salutary, and so as he rolled through the intersection, I yelled twice, as stentorian as I could muster:

"You have to look both ways, pal."

In the temporary absence of unconstrained monster trucks roaring past at speeds far exceeding our unenforced limits, he quite obviously heard me and was startled, which makes perfect sense considering that he had not looked in both directions, and had absolutely no idea a person OUTSIDE of an automobile was anywhere near him. He pumped the brakes and could be seen peering quizzically into the driver’s side mirror, but he kept going, on to Main Street.

This sort of thing, and of course far worse, is a regular feature of New Albany’s one-way street grid. Usually I don’t know the oblivious drivers involved, but in this case I do. Lamar Dowell is a Democratic Party elder and grandee -- a funder, and an anointer. I've been told many times that he's one of the partisan kingmakers in town. My guess is that he's a good fellow, and perhaps it is improper of me to identify him in this fashion, but you see, as a walker and cyclist, I experience the dysfunction of one-way streets on a constant basis, and as a Democratic Party stalwart in a Democratic Party one-party town, Mr. Dowell is among those in a prime position to influence a resolution.

It’s a resolution that never seems to occur. If I were to ask Mr. Dowell what he thinks about two-way streets, what do you think he would say? My guess is that in large measure, he'd mouth the generally cowardly and evasive response we've received from city officials to date:

"We need a comprehensive study to prove that the bad driving you witnessed from me today really was as bad as it seemed, precisely at the tipping point of me coming very close to running you over because I couldn’t be bothered to drive safely."

As for myself, I tend to believe my own eyes, and what I see is that the collective mindset of our local Democratic leadership remains profoundly conservative and reactive, particularly among its elders. There comes a time when one cannot ignore the fact that when such flagrant dysfunction, of which one-way streets are merely a prominent and glaring example, is perpetuated over long periods of time, the political party most often "in charge" must be the entity doing the bulk of the perpetuating.

There is no other plausible explanation, and if I could break its back, I would.

---

However, we must give the Democratic Party’s one-party municipal patronage machine full credit for functioning at peak efficiency of late. The city council’s 8-1 “Democratic” majority has been absolute, with lone Republican Kevin Zurschmiede obviously disinterested, maverick Diane Benedetti completely isolated and the body’s president, Pat McLaughlin, performing supinely as de facto City Hall shop steward.

In the absence of upper echelon communication, this is a problem. Even card-carrying Democrats on the council can’t remember the last time Mayor Jeff Gahan stooped to attend a meeting, and if you think such appearances aren’t important, visit YouTube and watch as British prime ministers are questioned in sessions of Parliament. Rotating underlings simply cannot fill the shoes of the man who was chosen by voters to lead the city, and yet month after month, they’re all we get.

This absence of substantive civic dialogue extends to those bodies which specialize in knowing where the bodies are buried. The Board of Public Works and Redevelopment Commission (to name just two) are duly packed BY the operatives of the dominant political party, WITH the operatives of the dominant political party. This is what patronage is all about, after all. Their meetings are held at the same time as working people work. Meetings are recorded with audio, but not filmed, and meeting minutes, while posted on-line, often appear weeks and sometimes months after the fact.

In a 24-7-365 world, this simply isn’t adequate. However, it’s surely intentional, both from the perspective of the local Democratic Party and the current mayoral administration. Mayor Gahan’s administration is guarded, non-transparent and generally unwilling to engage with the public apart from carefully scripted appearances.

It verges on paranoiac, and we have become a veritable Newalbanystan on the Wild West Bank of the Ohio. When “advise and consent” usually occurs out of public view in a one-party city, and when the second pillar of the two-party system is crippled and inert, there exists a fundamental duty to dissent.

Sigh. It might as well be me, I guess.

---

The newspaper politely records what it is told, on rare occasions when it is told things.

The city’s social media presence is outsourced and functions mostly as a one-way, top-down information portal, not a two-way interactive space.

The executive branch is not available for public questioning by the legislative branch, but even if it were, the stage-managed legislative branch wouldn’t be asking any meaningful questions, and by its own recent admission, it waits helplessly for guidance from above, as channeled by the Democrats – the dominant political party.

Periodically, grandiose public works projects are announced, creative financing measures deployed, and finished plans presented for approbation and approval – not desiring of public input in any consistent or contextual sense, but presented in largely final form, to be ritualistically praised and quickly implemented without any need to offer explanations according to a larger, more comprehensive plan … and subject to John Rosenbarger’s usual Orwellian rewrites, in the redevelopment dungeon, whenever the mood strikes.

And yet the one solitary time when City Hall has certifiably slammed on the brakes, refusing to present the finished objective, and insisting it just MUST wait for consultative guidance from elsewhere, the topic at hand is “complete” street grid reform and two-way conversions, this being the very fundamental “cardiovascular” infrastructure prerequisite that, if offered FIRST, from the beginning, might have unified all the other grandiose public works projects into a coherent whole.

This is why I say that even if we assume City Hall’s private reassurances of street grid intent are sincere, and trust that reform merely awaits the comforting finality of Jeff Speck’s street study, the mayor’s unwillingness to speak publicly about this issue in advance of Speck’s report – to advance, lead and engage from the front of something that is critically important, rather than skulking to the rear – is quite simply ominous.

You can be sure that the local Democratic Party, as supported by shadowy grandees like Mr. Dowell, effectively has the mayor’s back.

And that’s why one-party governments like ours are so odious.

ON THE AVENUES: One-keg parties rarely work, either.

ON THE AVENUES: One-keg parties rarely work, either.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Recently I’ve been fascinated anew by the concept of the one-party state.

A single-party state, one-party state, one-party system or single-party system is a type of state in which a single political party has the right to form the government, usually based on the existing constitution. All other parties are either outlawed or allowed to take only a limited and controlled participation in elections. Sometimes the term de facto single-party state is used to describe a dominant-party system that, unlike the single-party state, allows (at least nominally) democratic multiparty elections, but the existing practices or balance of political power effectively prevent the opposition from winning the elections.

To American ears, “one-party states” and “Communist countries” are synonymous, but non-leftist regimes of fascistic and theocratic bents certainly have managed them, too. I never went to Spain under Franco (he remains dead, you know) or Iran when the Islamic Republican Party held sway, but my youthful travels included the USSR and most of the countries of the Warsaw Pact when they were one-party, or de facto single-party, entities.

The fact that I was drunk much of the time during these visits does not change the fact that on balance, they were sobering experiences.

Obviously, the very notion of a one-party state embraces the concentration of power within one sphere, according to a single set of guidelines, and with avenues of political participation effectively closed apart from reigning orthodoxy. In the absence of palpable opposition, the sole party devotes itself to maintaining its own entrenched bureaucracy, safe in the knowledge that governmental institutions merely mimic the party’s own time-honored levers, and cannot be detached either physically or metaphorically from the entrenched patronage of the party itself.

Or, in other words, much like political life in New Albany.

---

Okay, okay.

I won’t contest for a single moment that my analogy is strained, because comparing a totalitarian system like North Korea’s to New Albany’s Demo-Dixiecratic stranglehold makes little sense apart from the unquestioned superiority of Kim Jong-un’s haircut.

In New Albany, there is a legal opposition party, even if a powerful microscope is required to find it, although as recently as Bill Clinton’s second term, the Republican Party actually managed to secure the mayor’s chair. Since Regina Overton’s rule-by date expired, the GOP’s invisibility in New Albany has made the word “nominal” appear almost superhuman by comparison.

Mental exhaustion might explain the urban Republican malaise. One fine night you’re having sweet, patriotically tumescent dreams of the heyday of the Gipper, only to awake and find that Dave Matthews is still the party chairman. Consequently, new ideas emanating from local Republicans are so exceedingly rare that we may have to erect a historical marker to commemorate the most recent one, assuming anyone is alive who remembers it.

My point is simple: While seemingly extinct in New Albany, ideas genuinely matter. As abysmally and resolutely stupid as humans are capable of being, we’re nothing without the primacy of ideas. Accordingly, in the one-horse, one-party Demo-Dixiecrat city that New Albany somehow has become, the disintegration of the GOP as electorally credible opposition has produced bitter irony: Both Republicans and their counterparts are plainly eviscerated when it comes to the health and vigor of ideas, perhaps because ideas are like muscles, and atrophy when unused.

What do you have for us, GOP?

(crickets chirp, pins drop)

Gads. All right, what about you, Demo-Dixiecrats?

(somewhere, a dog barks)

Is there a principled independent in the house? Please?

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It isn’t that individual Democrats can’t be fine people. Many are. It isn’t that they don’t have ideas. Some do. It’s just that their long-standing, one-party political culture invariably acts to portray the very act of thinking as subversive, pornographic and unnecessary for the task at hand: Urban decay management.

Recently, when at-large councilman John Gonder made yet another doomed attempt to publicly think outside the box, this time about possible future locations for the farmers market, a veritable mob of his fellow party members grabbed their Louisville Sluggers and aimed straight for his groin. Whatever merits there may or may not have been in his parking garage proposal, he was tarred and pilloried for having the temerity to think aloud.

How dare he question a payback already budgeted!

Inside this town’s city limits, it’s a revolutionary act to think at all, silently or aloud, but Gonder persists in trying; yet surely he knows that his party’s unassailable political hegemony precludes a marketplace of ideas, which always must remain safely behind closed doors, carefully guarded against unmanageable mutation, until they’ve been vigorously scrubbed clean of meaningful content, and can at long last be released in fully non-realized, formless dimension, shovel- and ordinance-ready, without the messy necessity of evolving in an open, transparent forum.

In due time, the Jeff Speck street study will become the greatest of all litmus tests of what I’m writing here today. I hope, pray, wish and yearn that Speck gets it dead right, the city energetically complies, and streets are calmed, completed and re-directed at long last – over a period of months, and not decades. It could happen, and if it does, it will be over the strenuous objections and self-immolations not of Republicans, but of the Demo-Dixiecrats themselves.

Speck’s fruition may well require a local Gorbachev. To put it mildly, one has yet to step forward, and so it remains axiomatic: If a one-party city can’t control the gestation of ideas and neuter the ones leaking through the cordon, then what good is it to have a monopoly on power in the first place?

---

The root problem – for the city, its residents and the current Democratic Party’s own vitality – is that forcing creativity through a single narrow channel of a self-interested, self-perpetuating hierarchy deadens the reproductive capacity of ideas. In fact, ideas are best encouraged to be promiscuous, and in this sense, leaden monogamy under the aegis of one party’s ages-old prophylactic power structure, helmed by one party’s enduring, mind-numbing, time-serving usual suspects, severely inhibits creativity’s proper procreation.

The result is a dominant one-party tub of goo, a morass virtually indistinguishable from the forlorn, bedraggled GOP “opposition.” But the same grimy spoils of small-potato patronage are duly apportioned, just as they were when Glenn Miller ruled the airwaves, and the one-party band plays on – unable to afford a dose of Auto-Tune, and unwilling to stop.

With new ideas, creative expressions and future hope in New Albany confined almost entirely to an entrepreneurial ghetto of outsiders investing and existing light years outside the one-party intellectual straitjacket, a revolution of rising expectations slowly percolates.

Will the one-party city permit progress to come to a boil in our lifetimes? I doubt it, but maybe, for once in a Bicentennial, they’ll prove me wrong.

Where are you, Mikhail? We need another keg ... and fast.