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Editorial: Endorsements are feature of our participation in democracy

We've been watching democracy play out on the national stage for months now, and this week, it flared onto our front pages, TV screens and mobile devices with the results of the Iowa caucuses. Over the next five and a half weeks, the surge is coming to Illinois, culminating in our own primary elections on March 15.

It is not always, as anyone will attest, a pretty process, but its end result, regardless of the outcome, is something magnificent - we citizens selecting the individuals we deem worthy of making and enforcing the rules by which our communities, our state and our nation will operate. It's a fundamental order pioneered in the modern era by Americans and which operates here as nowhere else. It's an ideal built through the sacrifices, suffering and devotion not just of past generations but of contemporary men and women every day.

You may not feel such a patriotic swell when you answer your door to the knock of someone seeking to become clerk of the circuit court or county board member or even state representative or senator, and you surely may recoil at some of the rhetoric even from the high-profile campaigns for president of the United States.

But every campaign, every office, every candidate is a facet of the system we celebrate and revere.

Participation, of course, is the key component to the health of this system, and as an institutional citizen, we at the newspaper consider it a duty both to encourage your participation and to actively participate ourselves as well.

To that end, over the next three weeks, we will be sharing the results of our own review of candidates through endorsements in contested campaigns for government offices, most of which do not attract the headlines and web hits of a contentious battle to lead the nation but all of which play a significant role in the management of daily life in the suburbs.

We do not come by these decisions lightly. Our editors are interviewing candidates face to face and studying campaigns carefully, aiming, as any voter would, to identify individuals we think best able to fulfill the duties of the offices they seek.

As we announce our selections and our reasoning, we have no illusions that we will persuade each of you to our way of thinking. We'd like that, of course, but more important, we want to enhance your participation. We want to challenge your own reasoning. We want to get and keep you involved.

Our endorsements will appear periodically beginning Sunday and leading up to the first day of early voting on Feb. 29. They are one dimension of our own participation in the democracy we all hold dear. Whether you agree with all our choices or not, we hope you'll get involved with us.

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