Republicans begin overrunning the Hillsboro school board

[0rganism]

Strangely enough, the Hillsboro Tribune has an interesting article on this:
http://portlandtribune.com/ht/117-hillsboro-tribune-news/154233-non-partisan-races-going-political

The upshot is, a GOP ex-state-rep (Lindsay) has started an organization called "Oregon Leadership Initiative" which pushed for three conservative school board candidates (nominally non-partisan positions), 2 of whom won. It was very stealthy, hell I even voted for one of them (Seligman, he really put it out there that he cared about kids and the well-being of public education). Maybe this seems insignificant, but it's how the GOP gets some of its ace players nationwide: ramp them up through school boards and city council positions. It's like their bush-league before the minors. They've been doing this for decades around the country, with some real damaging consequences for municpalities, and it looks like they're targeting Washington county now. Anyway, point is, the OLI could be a problem for us in 2014.

[cascadiance]

1. Yes, there was some gamesmanship in this last election....

Was present at a Washington County Democrats meeting where a candidate successfully prevented an endorsement from happening from the party for a certain candidate in Beaverton by saying it needed to happen to ensure the other candidates would campaign for the funding initiative to be pushed by all candidates and therefore none of them should be endorsed. It kind of made sense at the time, as the funding prop passing was viewed as probably more important than any one of the candidates running (most if not all leaning Democrat even though not stated), and I don't think this person was a Republican, but you can see how the gamesmanship was going on that could have been used by this group on many levels to get their people elected when the other side wasn't prepared for it.