(Also available in blue.)
Very early this morning as I was doing research for my Wednesday morning turn at posting Coffee Talk at MichiganLiberal.com (analogous to the dKos Mid-Day Open Thread, but posted at the ungodly hour of 7:30AM), I was clicking through the Grand Rapids Press section of MLive.com. The article was about the Michigan/Florida primary boondoggle and how that all may have to be straightened out in light of the tight race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The paragraph said:
Beyond Michigan and Florida, they could hold the nomination in their grasp. Michigan's super delegates include Granholm, Levin and fellow Sen. Debbie Stabenow, six members of Congress, 17 state members of the Democratic National Committee and two members to be chosen in May. There are no DNC members from west of Lansing.
That last line floored me.
I did a little poking around the dKosopedia, and the article is right. The members of the DNC representing Michigan are as follows:
Mark Brewer | Clinton Twp. MI |
Arthenia Abbott | Lansing MI |
Lu Battaglieri | E. Lansing MI |
Elizabeth Bunn | Detroit MI |
Debbie Dingell | Dearborn MI |
Joel Ferguson | Lansing MI |
Melvin "Butch" Hollowell | Detroit MI |
Hon. Kwame Kilpatrick | Detroit MI |
Joyce Lalonde | Eastpointe MI |
Hon. Christina Montague | Ann Arbor MI |
Erin Parsons-Wright | Lansing MI |
Jeffrey Radjewski | Chesterfield Twp. MI |
Virgie Rollins | Detroit MI |
Richard Shoemaker | Detroit MI |
Jim Sype | Okemos MI |
Richard Wiener | Lansing MI |
Not one of those folks is from outside the Detroit or Lansing areas.
I know when everyone from outside Michigan thinks of Michigan, they think of Detroit. When they think of Detroit, they think of the auto industry, Motown, and crime (we'll tackle misconceptions about Detroit in another diary.) Detroit is nice, and Detroit is huge, but it's not the whole state.
And yes, Lansing is the state capital. Lansing is where all the real political movers-and-shakers live, from the Governor on down to the fine folks at Progress Michigan. But Michigan doesn't end there, either.
Time to think like a true Michiganian Michigander: hold out your left hand, palm down. Now use the index finger on your right hand to point to the base of your left thumb. That's Detroit. Now point to the middle of your palm. That's Lansing. Notice anything? There's a whole lotta territory beyond your thumb and your palm. You've got your knuckles, the inside of your palm, and your fingers.
Around these parts we call them Kalamazoo (yes, there really is a Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo), Grand Rapids (Furniture City USA), Battle Creek (Cereal City USA), Holland (home of windmills, klompen shoes, and a hell of a lot of Republicans), St. Joseph/Benton Harbor (home of Whirlpool and KitchenAid), Grand Haven (Coast Guard City USA), Muskegon (the mistake by the lake The Port City--and my hometown), Ludington, Manistee, Traverse City (the Cherry Capital), Flint (home of Buick), Saginaw, Midland (home of Dow Chemical), Bay City, Alpena, Petoskey, and Mackinaw City, to say nothing of the entire Upper Peninsula (da U.P., eh! and home of the Nimrods).
The population of the nine-county Detroit CSA is 5.9 million people. The population of the Lansing MSA is 454,000. That's only 6.3 million. The population of Michigan as a whole is 9.9 million (give or take a couple moving vans headed down I-75). So by my count, that leaves 3.3 million people without any kind of representation on the Democratic National Committee.
And this year, those 3.3 million people aren't just any 3.3 million people. They're Michigan voters, who were subjected to this primary boondoggle by the Michigan Legislature, Governor Granholm, the Michigan Democratic Party, and yes, the DNC. As the fate of Michigan's convention delegation hangs in the balance, it looks like it's going to be left up to the DNC's Credentials Committee. Wouldn't it be nice if these 3.3 million voters had a say in what's going on?
Beyond that, let me just say that I'm a big believer in the 50-State Strategy. It clearly paid dividends in 2006. We won races in several oddball districts simply because we had candidates on the ground. Between the Democracy Bond project and the 50-State Strategy, the DNC is endeavoring to put paid DNC staffers on the ground in all 50 states in an effort to boost the DNC brand and make us competitive everywhere, not just the liberal northeast and California.
There are 435 Congressional districts in the United States, which constitutionally are designed to be roughly equal in size to ensure that each and every American has representation in Congress and access to their representative (gerrymandering...well, as Alton Brown would say, that's another diary). There are also 440 members of the Democratic National Committee. How is it that, with roughly equal numbers, such large swaths of the country are going unrepresented at the DNC?
And so I propose a change to the DNC by-laws: Henceforth, one member of the Democratic National Committee should be elected from each of the 435 Congressional districts in the United States. It's time for the DNC to put its money where its mouth is and ensure that it operates according to its name, democratically.