Questions for the candidates were written down and apparently screened by a couple party operatives - an unnecessary and undemocratic step - open questions would have worked in the room of 30-40 people. It gave me a taste of what big city machine politics of yore must have been like. But all in all, it was a lively expression of democracy.
I've been going to these DFL meetups in the Uptown area since this summer. I wouldn't exactly characterize any part of the meeting as being run by "party operatives" or being undemocratic. The purposes of these meetups is to get people who are interested in politics involved outside of the normal caucus/campaign/election framework that party activists are already plugged into. As such, they are not candidate forums, but of course candidates for office are as welcome as everybody else. The point is, these meetups have agendas outside of asking candidates questions.
Last month, our meetup had a number of surprise attendees: Mayor R.T. Rybak, Peter McLaughlin, and about half a dozen candidates for city council. It was wonderful to see so many candidates show up, and of course we spent a great deal of time listening to them and asking questions. As might be expected, this pretty much took over the meeting. So when we had more candidates appear this month, a little order was instituted by having people write down questions so that the most popular questions would be asked. The people doing this were not "party operatives", but the volunteers who put these meetups on every month. I think that it worked very well and people got a very good idea of what the candidates stood for.
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Nathan Hunstad
Minneapolis, MN
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