If you've come here looking for a Goodbye Cruel Democrats rant, or a reprise of the five articles, 30-odd blogs, dozens of Diaries, scores of e-mails and 5,000 comments I've read over the past 12 hours about Paul Hackett's departure from the Ohio Senate race, you're out of luck.
Although I know it's a long-shot, I'm hoping maybe something good for Ohio, the nation and the netroots can be morphed out of this mess by pulling out all the stops to encourage Major Hackett to revisit his decision not to run in Ohio's District 2.
Like a megaton of other people, I dropped my head into my hands and shrieked a few profanities last night two seconds after encountering
The New York Times story
announcing Hackett had chosen to leave the race and maybe politics altogether. Just what we need, I thought, another friggin' internecine and highly public fight in the coalition we call the Democratic Party. I didn't even want to look at what I knew after the first
Times paragraph would instantly become a blogucopia of charges, counter-charges and flamethrowers ratcheted up to full burn. Sure enough, before long people whom I respect wound up spitting sparks at people whom I respect.
As I said, I am not going to delve into all the arguments here. Anybody still reading thus far into my Diary can probably recite by heart the views of all sides in this affair. Markos has another 350-comment piece up right now that contrasts quite positively with what I found objectionable in the piece he wrote last night. If you really care about what I think, both Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers over at MyDD pretty much speak for me in this matter here and here.
The post mortems, however, might still be premature.
Let me reminisce just a little.
In 1964, when I was four years too young to vote, I did my first work for the Democratic Party, registering black voters in Mississippi as a part of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Freedom Summer. Every one of the seven women and men that Charly Biggers and I registered that June and July and early August signed up as Democrats, new members of a party brimful with Klansmen and other deep-fried racists. Three of our number were murdered for their efforts just as dozens of blacks had been murdered previously for being uppity about their 15th Amendment rights.
But those seven and 63,000 other black citizens also signed up with another of SNCC's projects, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a parallel alternative to the state's official Democrats.
The Mississippi Democratic Party organizations were all white, as was the delegation they sent to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City that year. The delegates represented white Democrats who had passed at their statewide meeting resolutions denouncing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, demanding that the U.S. Supreme Court be purged, and calling for "separation of the races in all phases of our society."
In his book, Pillars of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65, Taylor Branch noted that the chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party boasted that it "could seat a dozen dead dodos brought [to the Democratic Convention] in silver caskets and nobody could do anything about it."
Frozen out of the party, the MFDP elected 68 of its own delegates and sent them to Atlantic City to argue that theirs was the legitimate delegation, because their primaries had been open to all citizens of Mississippi. Some friends and I watched on television as Fannie Lou Hamer stood up and said at the convention credentials committee meeting:
It was the 31st of August in 1962 that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the country courthouse in Indianola to try to register to try to become first-class citizens.
We was met in Indianola by Mississippi men, Highway Patrolmens and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time. After we had taken this test and started back to Ruleville, we was held up by the City Police and the State Highway Patrolmen and carried back to Indianola where the bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the wrong color.
After we paid the fine among us, we continued on to Ruleville, and Reverend Jeff Sunny carried me four miles in the rural area where I had worked as a timekeeper and sharecropper for 18 years. I was met there by my children, who told me that the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down to try to register.
After they told me, my husband came, and said that the plantation owner was raising cain because I had tired to register, and before he quit talking the plantation owner came, and said, "Fanny Lou, do you know--did Pap tell you what I said?"
And I said, "yes, sir."
He said, "I mean that," he said, "If you don't go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave," said,
"Then if you go down and withdraw," he said, "You will--you might have to go because we are not ready for that in Mississippi."
And I addressed him and told him and said, "I didn't try to register for you. I tried to register for myself."
I had to leave that same night.
On the 10th of September 1962, 16 bullets was fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker for me. That same night two girls were shot in Ruleville, Mississippi. Also Mr. Joe McDonald's house was shot in.
{snip}
If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?
The MFDP had put Lyndon Johnson in a bind. To win the election, he needed the Southern white power structure that had for decades condoned violence to keep blacks from voting or living as normal human beings. He worried that the MFDP might mess things up so badly that he would lose in November to Barry Goldwater. Under his orders, the FBI spied on the MFDP. He gave Hubert Humphrey, who had considerable credibility among blacks for his Senate leadership in the fight for the Civil Rights Act, the task of coming up with a compromise.
It was a terrible bargain for the MFDP. Shut up and we'll let you sit down at two at-large seats added to the Mississippi Democratic Party delegation. With limited dissent, the Freedom Democrats rejected it. Most of us political novices agreed with them, and some of us said screw the Democrats if they refuse to act on this matter of conscience. But we also agreed with persisting in the fight to bring about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the law that forced Southern Democrats to abandon their overt efforts to keep blacks out of the voting booth. Only allying with the Democratic Party could make that happen.
Consequently, courageous people stuck it out and broke the Dixiecrat stranglehold, changing the party forever in the process.
What the hell does all this verbiage from some tired old guy about something that happened 42 years ago have to do with right now? Nothing directly. Just a reminder to those who are fed up to their eyeballs with the Democratic Party's elite that altering the status quo can't be achieved overnight. And that the forces arrayed against the party's activist rebels today are scarcely as inflexible and irksome as the likes of John Stennis, James Eastland, John McClellan, Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, Russell Long, Orval Faubus, George Wallace, Lester Maddox and other Southern Senators, Representatives and Governors who held the Democratic Party of my youth hostage to their racist sectionalism. If that Democratic Party was worth fighting to change, surely the current incarnation is.
What I'm suggesting, hoping for, may be outside the realm of possibility. I'm not from Ohio. So obviously I don't know all the ins and outs of the political scene there, although I've read plenty since last night. Viscerally, I find myself dependent on comments from people who obviously DO know something about Ohio politics, like Pounder, cfk and The Cincinnati Kid.
In announcing his departure from the Senate race, Major Hackett said on his Web site:
I will not be running in the Second Congressional District nor for any other elective office. This decision is final, and not subject to reconsideration.
Final as that sounds, I hope he can be brought around.
Why in the world would he do that given his anger at Democratic Party leaders who he feels stabbed him in the back? Why add one more minute to an 11-month political career that has so deeply soured him on the party? What not just stick with "good riddance" and move on? Because he may well be the only person with a chance to seize Ohio's 2nd District from Jean Schmidt. That would benefit us all.
As I said, I don't know the ins and outs of Ohio politics, so somebody may tell me I'm just talking out of my ass here. But with all due respect to the four candidates running in the Democratic primary right now, none seems a likely winner come November.
They are high school teacher Gaby Downey, former transportation engineer Jeff Sinnard, hospital administrator Jim Parker and businessman Thor Jacobs. Only Parker has run for office previously. He finished fourth in the special primary last year.
Having read all their on-line campaign stuff, it sounds to me that we have four nice people with progressive ideas, only one of whom - Jacobs - has even a ghost of a chance in the general. Surely, the goal of each of these candidates is to see a Democrat in Jean Schmidt's seat come January. Surely they know that Hackett seems more likely than any of them to beat the incumbent. Surely, the three of them to whom Hackett vowed he would not run in the district could be persuaded to release him from that pledge.
Congressman Hackett could bring good representation to the district, work to end party practices that trouble him and so many other rank-and-file Democrats, and, if he still thinks Washington is his cup of tea, poise him for a run on Senator Voinovich's seat in 2010.
There's not much time. Hackett has to declare and provide 1,000 petition signatures by close of business on Thursday. If his mind is going to be changed, it's gotta be now. I urge his Kossack supporters in and out of Ohio to do their utmost to persuade him. If he agrees, I'll pledge $100 to his campaign. And another $100 if he wins the primary.
Take the poll.