A Threadbare Penny Ante Politician Calls it a Day

The Geezer gets an award at the Jefferson Dinner, 2008

Counting backwards on my fingers and toes, as best as I can figure out, I responded to a tiny two line want ad in my local newspaper, the Northwest Herald, in the fall of 1988.  The McHenry County Democratic Party Chair at the time, a lawyer named Richard Short was pleading for volunteers to assume one of the many open precinct committeeman slots in the party.  I think I was the only fish he landed.

I had lived in isolation, aside from family, in Crystal Lake since moving from Chicago in ’85.  I was working second shift as a school custodian and tending my three year old daughter during the mornings and early afternoon while my wife was at work.  I knew practically no one.  But I was an old activist and yearned to make some connection, to do something.

So I agreed to circulate my petitions for election as committeeman for Nunda Township, Precinct 3.  I knocked on a few doors on my block until I had twenty signatures.  In the spring primary of 1987 about twice that many people made it all the way down to the bottom of the Democratic ballot and elected me to a job I didn’t really understand.

It turned out that the tiny, battered Democratic Party, always a distant second in a rock ribbed Republican Party was undergoing a little upheaval.  The Chairman who recruited me it turned out was really in cahoots with Republican boss Al Jourdan who needed at least a paper party to rally his troops against.  Two guys were running to take his place, a long time party regular who was always the top vote getter in the county, running up huge numbers and even a majority year after year in his Wonder Lake precinct and a younger guy who was running as a liberal insurgent.  Without ever having attended a party meeting I found both candidates in my living room wooing my 20 votes at the upcoming party convention.  I picked a guy, and sure enough he squeaked in on the strength of my votes.  Turned out to be a bad choice, but what did I know.

I have been a committeeman—we changed the name a few years ago and call the job precinct representative now—ever since.  I was elected every time except on year when I got pneumonia and couldn’t get my nominating petitions signed.  I was appointed to fill my own vacancy by the Party chair that year.  Come this spring I will have served 26 years.

In that time I have seen the party grow and I’ve nurtured wounds in some bad years.  I served in many ways, including both unofficial and official party flack and designated spinner. I was an insurgent reformer and a party loyalist by turns.  I was the first committeeman to publicly support a young lawyer named Jack Franks in a contested primary for State Representative against the then Chair, Frank McClatchy—which I have sometimes regretted as Jack has become the most conservative Democrat in the House. I was Vice Chair and briefly took over the Chairmanship when Bob McGarry died. Later I was elected to two terms as party secretary.

I have run for office—and been trounced—three times.  First for Crystal Lake City Council, then for County Board, and finally for Township Board.  I organized special events, marched in innumerable parades, a pulled duty every year at the party booth at the County Fair.  I have advised numerous campaigns and provided press and public relations services for free to half a dozen others.  I even met  young State Senator named Barak Obama and engaged in a long conversation with him in the dust at the State Fair.  He wanted to run for the U.S. Senate.  I was deeply impressed but disappointed that a black guy with a name like that had no chance to get elected state wide in Illinois.  Shows you what I know.

Then back in 2030 having run out of more respectable and deserving options, the Party presented me with the Robert McGarry Award for Community Service at the annual Thomas Jefferson Dinner.

It’s been a good run.  But the second senior Committeeman in McHenry County is calling it a day.  At 63 years old I don’t have quite the spring in my step that I used to.  But more important working two jobs, including overnight hours on the weekends has made it increasingly difficult to fully service and canvas my precinct.  This past year for the first time I failed to complete doing at least a literature drop before the connection.  I only ever got to the few blocks nearest my house.  Part of me thinks that if I had worked the whole precinct and done a better canvas that I might have gotten enough votes to get my friend Kathy Bergan-Schmidt re-elected.

I will leave the precinct in good hands. Top local activist John Darger lives in the precinct and has coveted the job for years.  He even challenged me twice in almost unheard of contested elections for the job.  He will do a good job.

Mind you, I am not leaving the Party altogether.  I will anoint myself a wise elder statesman and annoy everyone with my pompous observations at regular meetings.  I plan to still make most of them, but if I can’t get a ride I won’t feel compelled to hike three miles up Rt. 14 in the snow just to make a meeting at McHenry County College. 

I would be pleased if the party could occasionally find some use for whatever skills I have and my long institutional memory.

Some of the time that I have to the Party will be channeled into my work as Social Justice Chair of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, writing and blogging, and a little freelance rabble rousing and hell raising.

I’m not ready for the pasture just yet.

Up From the Ashes—Just Two Years Ago Today

Note:  It was the day after the 2010 midterm election.  Democrats across the country had taken an unprecedented beating from frightened and angry voters after the economic crash.  A new breed of Tea Party Republicans were vaulted into power in Congress and in many states.  I took a movement to both grieve and look ahead.  I’m reposting this not to show off my awesome powers of prognostication, but as a marker of how far we have come.  And what a challenge and opportunity we have on Tuesday.

It’s the day after the Great Beating.  I am sore of soul and body.  Oh, it’s happened before.  I have been a pissant, penny-ante politician of sorts for a long time—24 years as a Democratic Committeeman in McHenry County, a few turns as a local Party officer, and three times a losing candidate for way down ballot offices.  I’ve lost before.  I’ve been beat before.  I have had my head handed to me.  It always hurts.  It hurts not because of ego or because my team lost, but because I am in politics because I care about certain things and losing often means that people who don’t give a damn about what I care about or are the active enemies of what I care about get to carry the ball.

Today was worse than usual.  It was a kind of massacre here in McHenry County, which returned to its old attachment to the Republicans in a big way returning the Democratic vote to the 30% range of the bad old days despite years of Party building and glimmers of success and hope lately.  Two years ago we even experienced elation.  Not only did we see Illinois’s own Barack Obama sweep to the Presidency and the state go Blue from top to bottom, but Democrats actually took McHenry County.  Now it all seems swept away.  Pause here for a moment of self-pity.

So the nose is broken, the teeth loose, a little blood trickles from the ear, the ribs are caved in, and the knee cap cracked.  But like that palooka in a boxing flick, I am still miraculously standing.  Hallelujah I will live to fight again!

Not to get too philosophical about the bloody business, but I am reminded of something said long ago by Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker that Martin Luther King, Jr.  liked so well that he paraphrased it and Obama admired so much that he had it woven into the new rug in the Oval Office.  King nicely boiled down Parker’s longer original to this:  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Just because the arc or the universe bends does not mean that the way to justice is smooth or unencumbered.  That’s why the arc is long—to overcome the many obstacles placed in the way.  Nor does it mean that justice is fated and we can all just go along for the ride.  Movement on the long arc to justice depends on the continuing effort and struggle of those who value it.  Parker, a leading abolitionist, King the civil rights crusader, and Obama all understood that.  So must we.

Today the Right Wing machine is gloating.  They imagine they have won not only one election, but the future.  The Pundocracy have smelled each other’s butts and come out baying the same song to the moon.  Conventional Wisdom that it is all over for Obama, Democrats, and progressivism took about a nanosecond to take hold.  And predictably the Left Wing blog-o-sphere has erupted in finger pointing, I-told-you-sos, and dozens of sure fire plans for a comeback.  Some of those plans merit a look, many are castles in the air, based on rigid ideological preconceptions, or totally ignorant of the way politics actually works and how change comes about. 

There will be time to sort it out.  

I’m not going to finger point.  I am sure there is blame to go around and I am as guilty as any for our common failures.  A little time will pass and we can look back and dissect the developments with more dispassion and to greater use.  That’s the process of understanding history.

And I am not going to lay out a grand scheme.  Not that I don’t have my notions, but that I am humbled enough to realize I may be fallible.  But I am going to make a broad prediction.

The next two years are going to be filled with excruciating moments for folks on my side.  With the Republicans firmly in control of the House of Representatives, the typically disunited Democrats holding on the Senate by their fingernails and Obama in the White House there will be gridlock.  The Republicans will not be able to advance their most hair-on-fire pet schemes.  Obama will not be able to advance his program either.  There will be a brief shadow play of an attempt at bi-partisanship, followed by the resumption of all out ideological war in Congress.  The presence of a number of Tea Partiers in the GOP caucuses will prevent any move to accommodation. 

Over the past twenty years the Republicans have shown that they are incapable of resisting the siren call of their fringes.  Congressional Democrats and the President on the other hand have shown that they are quite immune from the demands of their left base in pursuit of consensus.  That means that the Republicans will soon be committed to publicly trying to dismantle the social programs that people rely upon and support even if they claim to be budget hawks.  It won’t take long for Republican popularity to collapse.

Obama can forget about appointing another Supreme Court Justice, or for that matter anyone else.  The Republicans will block all of his appointment for posts high and low even if it means that Cabinet departments are being run clerks.  They will believe that this is heroic—the public will see it as something else.

If the Republicans succeed somehow in moving their worst ideas, including the annulment of Health Care Reform, Obama can counter with a veto that cannot be over ridden.  And despite his recent statements that Filibuster reform should be high on the incoming Senate’s agenda, both he and Senate Democrats will soon come to appreciate its charms.

Obama will, in response to what he perceives as a public demand, submit a budget with deep cuts.  It won’t matter.  The Republicans will cut more, and in very different places.  Serious budget reduction cannot be done without deep cuts to Defense, but the neo-con faction of the party, although eclipsed by the Tea Party, still clings to its imperial dreams and will not allow it.  And social conservatives will keep the defense budget high just to require cuts to social services.  In the end the Republican will deliver a budget that Obama will have to veto.  The veto cannot be overcome, so the government shut down so longed for by Michelle Bachmann and Rand Paul may come to be, and not just for a few hours or a few days.

By the time of the next election the Republicans will have made themselves so unpopular that they will be the victim of the next political tsunami.

That’s my prediction.  But Democrats and liberals cannot win even in that scenario if we do not begin the work today.

So straighten that broken nose, pick out those broken teeth, swab the blood from your ears, tape your ribs and your knee.  Get out of your corner.  The bell’s about to ring again.

 

The Words We Long to Hear from ANY Republican…

Sherman in Retirement.

Note:  Adapted from a post on June 5, 2010.

On June 5, 1884 William Tecumseh Sherman uttered words we would long to hear from a good many venal, corrupt, stupid or simply clueless folks who look into the mirror each morning and think, “there is the next President of the United States.”  Although variations are attributed to him, the most commonly accepted is, “I do not choose to run.  If nominated I will not accept.  If elected I will not serve.” 

Sherman rose to fame as Ulysses S. Grant’s favorite subordinate and most reliable commander.  They shared an unvarnished view of war stripped of myths of gallantry and chivalry.  Early in the Civil War Grant recalled Sherman after he suffered a mental breakdown.  Years later Sherman said, “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”

As the General in charge of cleaving the Confederacy in half and destroying its industrial and transportation heartland in his drive from Tennessee to Atlanta, the burning of Atlanta, the March to the Sea and then across South Carolina, Sherman was credited with creating modern all out war not only on enemy armies, but on enemy civilian populations.  He is cited for pithy quotes in unapologetic defense of his ferocity including, most famously “War is Hell” and “War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”  

This made him the most hated man in the South, where generations of mothers frightened their children to obedience by threatening them with “Sherman’s justice.” 

It also made him wildly popular in the North.  Upon Grant’s election to the Presidency in 1868, Sherman was the inevitable choice for Commanding General of the Army, a post he held until his retirement in 1883. 

Those years coincided with some of the bloodiest Indian Wars on the frontier, which the General pursued with the same grim determination that marked his Civil War service.  He said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” and is one of several people to whom the quote “nits make lice” is attributed as defense for killing children.  

In 1884 the Republican Party was divided and in disarray.  Chester Alan Arthur, the accidental President who rose to the White House from the Vice-Presidency with the assassination of James Garfield, was wildly unpopular.  The former Collector of the Port of New York and a product of the Spoils System had unexpectedly become a reformer and advocate of Civil Service reform, which put him at odds with the Party’s Stalwart faction.  But he was also no trusted by party liberals and reformers.  It was apparent that Arthur would not get the nomination for a full term.

 Maine Senator James G. Blaine was the front runner, but he had many enemies in the party himself.  The Democrats were expected to surge that year as more southern states emerged from Reconstruction.  Recalling electoral success with Generals Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Garfield, it was natural for party leaders to turn to the most famous and popular surviving General of the late War of Rebellion. 

Sherman would have none of it.  The nomination went to the Plumed Knight, Blaine, who promptly lost the election to Democrat Grover Cleveland. 

Sherman died in 1891 at the age of 71 after spending his final years in retirement giving speeches to Grand Army of the Republic gatherings and business groups.