Anyone have details? Any other official MEC announcements?

Who has the CNN style voter maps and wants to play election projection?

All I can say is that the back room politics are truly bizarre.

You should know how this works, he is a place holder so that the UAL MEC will not have to commit early. Even if they would publicly support "Mr. RJ, information is bad Rice," I doubt he would get the majority vote of his own MEC given the secret ballot. At the end of the day, I would bet there will be no legacy UAL pilot as a national officer, too small a gene pool.

This one will be decided by the regionals. Consider the candidates:

Lee Moak: Dresses up nice and says what you want to hear, whomever you are. In the end however, he is bought and paid for by DAL management and has a nice cushy job waiting for him when he is ready to make the move. Add to that the anger of the NWA pilots for what happened in the merger with the back room with Prater and you may well have a DAL split in the voting booth.

The other wild card here is that despite the discussion being "banned" in their offices, you can bet that Moak is considering taking DAL independant.

Scott Stratton: Non legacy. He could be the most qualified man on the planet, yet the legacies will never allow a "mere" freight pilot to be President. Remember what happened when Beebe stepped down and FedEx ran an incredibly qualified guy for VP of Finance. Prater ran Helling; who had screwed up everything he had touched against him, and won. Jalmer was giddy because he had a guy they could keep in the fog about finances.

John Prater: The village in Illinois left a message at the Diplomat. They don't want their idiot back. They found a better one. Clearly if ALPA survives...and I pray it does...he will go down in history as the worst mistake ever made by a BOD.

Paul Rice: Despite some warts, Paul has the accumen to run the organization. He has the ability to pull various groups together and find common ground and he knows that unless everyone finds that way to do it, not only will ALPA not survive, the profession will get picked apart by management. The same managements who laughed their a**es off when Prater got picked. Rice has a good reputation in the industry and has respect on Capitol Hill that Prater never had and Moak only thinks he has.

In the end, I suspect this will not be a first ballot presidency vote. CAL will see that Prater is not sustainable and will go with UAL. That will knock out Stratton and Prater in round one. I suspect in round two...and maybe three...that the regionals will be the ones who will look and see which one of the survivors will actually listen to them and not just tell them what they want to hear.

What will be even more interesting is the race for First Vice President. As of yesterday morning, NO ONE had announced for it. A historic first. None of these four are willing to consider the job right now. The question is which one will consider accepting it as a fall back position should they get knocked out of the race for President, or pull out prior to the voting for President.

My guess? No matter where a FDX guy goes for the next week, he'll be bird dogged by at least two of his new best friends from ATL who will promise the world.

YMMV

So how will that play out? Hey guys, vote for me and I will gut scope even more resulting in bigger planes for you guys to low bid on, maybe making a few bucks an hour more at first, only to quickly loose whatever you get in the next round of low bidding, by other ALPA regionals, other union regionals and non union regionals!

Wow what an inspiring campaign message.

It will be the standard, "hey it's just politics, but you're really one of us" lines. Once round one is over, it'll be a free for all.

To be concise, you are stating his campaign platform is:

"Elect me President of your organization, or I will destroy it" ??

If DAL pilots split votes along the lines seen in the Compass divestiture vote then Rice seems like a shoo in. The irony here is the reason Moak is popular with the regional pilots has most to do with actions taken by the f-NWA Reps.

Moak is not bought and paid for by management. That's ridiculous. He is smart enough to be relevant and has turned that position at the table into solid gains for his pilots.

The FedEx candidate from Boston has the funniest opening line of any campaign speech ... "Yankees Suck."

YouTube - Circus! Theme Music

ATC

Argue all you want about Prater's record, he saved a lot of jobs by cutting the "no retiree will return to work deal" when age 60 changed. It was naive to think he could have stopped it, given the ICAO rule and that a lot of senior pilots were independently lobbying for it. No doubt Rice will exploit this with his regional benefactors. He is clearly the best politician of the lot. ALPA President is his life long ambition. He has been working this deal for a very long time no matter the cost to the profession.

Too bad he sold out the legacy pilots for his own benefit in the RJ scope give away at UAL. He did it during the ESOP when the RJ's could have been kept in house. Also, watch how he will slip out of the blame for the $44m loss to ALPA in the UAL bond suit debacle. Better yet, someone should ask him how much did he get from the bonds while ignoring his fiduciary duty to protect the Association.

Unfortunately, your assessment of how the politics will play out may be correct. Rice owns the Regional pilots, and along with the mainline pilots that he can fool, or those that vote for anyone but "####," he looks like a shoo in. Regrettably, it may be the last nail in the ALPA coffin.

I think that no matter what the UAL MEC says publicly, Rice cannot come up with the votes and he is on his way out....of Washington. He was politically pretty savy but he played his cards incorrectly some time ago (as you pointed out) and he's history.

Opps...the wire just confirmed it. Sorry Paul, no corner office for you, in fact, no office anywhere in the building for you buddy.

Where to now ?

G'Luck with Lee Moak as President.