One of the most laborious processes we engage in each year in the newsroom is the endorsements of political candidates. Elizabeth Sullivan, our director of opinion content, coordinates the whole thing, identifying the races where endorsements are most meaningful, setting up the times for candidate interviews, collecting mailing out and collecting questionnaires for each candidate and arranging for the presence of members of the Editorial Board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. It’s a daunting amount of work, and she does it for every primary and general election season. Why do we endorse? That’s a question that comes to us regularly. Many of our colleagues across the nation have stopped doing it or curtailed it significantly, as their resources have diminished. We, however, have remained firmly committed. We have several reasons. One is that sources for voters to learn about candidates have diminished with cutbacks in media. We remain one of the few objective sources who put in the work to make determinations. We make good faith efforts to assess the candidates and recommend the best. For voters, our endorsements offer one piece of information they can use to make their decisions. Another is the format of our endorsement interviews. We bring together all of the candidates in a race willing to participate and ask them questions about topics that we feel are most pressing. If they feed us a bunch of hooey, we call them out on it. If they obfuscate, we go at it again. And the candidates have free rein to question and challenge each other. It’s a format that reveals elements of candidates’ personalities and how they respond under pressure. (To get an idea of how it works, watch the video of our endorsement interview with Lee Weingart and Chris Ronayne, candidates for Cuyahoga County Executive. It's at https://youtu.be/rZU8GX_Pu_s) One result of the interview format is we generally get clear positions from the candidates, free of their talking points, which means the voters get to know those positions. I note that our goal is not to predict winners. We recommend the people we think will do the job best, even if we are fairly certain they will lose. I also note that we sometimes endorse candidates we largely find unsatisfactory. We rarely opt not to endorse. Voters must choose, so we feel we would be copping out to say we don’t like any of the candidates and won’t endorse. We regularly hold our noses and endorse a bad candidate because the alternatives are worse. We do explain our feelings when we do this. I regularly receive email from readers noting that we endorsed an elected leader who is making news for incompetence or misbehavior. The implication is we are to blame for the misdeeds. Indeed, we have endorsed a rogue’s gallery over the years. Please consider that we don’t get to pick the candidates who run. We are left to endorse from the groups of candidates seeking office. Sometimes, it seems, misdeeds are likely no matter who wins, because the caliber of the candidates is so poor. We wish more smart, well-meaning people would run for office. Greater Cleveland desperately needs that, particularly on bodies like the Cuyahoga County Council. But running for office is not fun. You have to implore people for money to run your campaign, and you weather a lot of personal attacks. The polarization of the nation has made that all much worse. A smart person might take a look at that landscape and say no thanks. Absent a better lineup of candidates, we’ll continue to recommend the best of those who do run, even if they are unsatisfactory. And if you have found our endorsements useful over the years, you might send Elizabeth a note to let her know. I think she’d appreciate hearing that people find value in the task she manages so diligently each year. She is at esullivan@cleveland.com. Thanks for reading. | 